skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their product is on 95%+ of a huge market worldwide and everyone already uses it and knows about them. They don't need to sell their core product as the OEMs do it for them, and I seriously doubt that their commercials have any real impact on their sales.

The thing is Microsoft have succeeded despite their brand rather than because of it, and the company have long been demonised and seen as the convicted monopolist and stuffy and corporate. Notice how the Microsoft brand is played down on both the Zune and Xbox 360 sites for example.

Trying to humanise the company and making them seem less corporate by giving them a friendly face is probably a good thing for their brand in the long term, will make people associate with their brand more positively and in my view is certainly a better direction than yet another Vista campaign that will do little to raise awareness further and shift very few copies.
interesting point - worth a comment in the blog post
Did you guys see Bee Movie? Did you see the Jerry Seinfeld ads for it?

Compared to the BM ads, especially, this is pretty funny. (I actually think it's decent on its own, but I've always been a big Seinfeld fan.)

It doesn't do much for MS's image, though, as far as I can tell. I thought Bill Gates was already popularish? The problem is the company.
So the Government should buy with our money assets that nobody wants, so the sellers can avoid losses, right?

Wrong.
Chrome To Get Extensions - Just Not Yet
I don't understand why Microsoft needs to advertise on TV...most people I know don't see it on TV and use windows anyway.
This is neat(!).

Keep in mind that this is the MITS Altair of future home fabbers. It can't do much but just come back in 30 years or so. ;)
Well, references gets back to the issue of identity. If I can forge identity, I can apply as someone else and use their references. Then when checking references do HR people have to say, "was she a brunette, medium build with thick framed glasses?" And that's not great at proving the validity of that reference.

Interviews can help, but it's only partial. Let's pretend to work in HR. We have a position open for a senior programmer with a generous salary. We get 100 applicants. Well, we could interview all 100 of them, but that would certainly take a long time. If we don't have credentials that we trust on any of them, the interview must be quite extensive. Microsoft's interviews last an entire day. So, in order to hire someone from this group, it takes 100 days of work (whether that's 1 person working for 100 days or 10 people working for 10 days, it's a lot of work). And that's basically just lost productivity. With salaries of $50,000/yr, we've spent roughly $20,000 to hire one person.

Now, let's say that we require a BS in Computer Science and we trust identity in out society (no impersonations). Maybe we can weed out many of them who are simply kiddies using Joomla. Beyond that, we could even discriminate by institution. MIT to the top of the pile please! And so on. . .

Identity allows us to trust the information we receive from other sources. When your buddy vouches that you're fun to one of his friends, that friend knows your buddy and accepts that premise. They don't need to test you - they've accepted the credential that your mutual friend has provided. Likewise, a degree from MIT in Computer Science vouches for you as a major league nerd. While an HR department should still challenge you in an interview, it can allow them to weed out those who have no one to vouch for them and allows for somewhat more relaxed testing.

Heck, I get most of my work based off my portfolio. If others can claim to be me, they are able to use the sites I've built as vouching for them.

In the long run, people who are forging are found out. Eventually, that person with the bogus CS degree doesn't know what they should know and they're out. But in the short run, there's a ton of waste. They're drawing a salary as they work slower and produce crappier code. If we are trying to be efficient, we want to eliminate that waste.
Here is another one.
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Jeeez I spent a whole 5 minutes scan reading the article for the answer. Why can't people start long articles with the conclusions first? Would save everyone a lot of time.
Exactly. Another example is the recent Honda ads.

(Tho' actually I suspect those are are more about changing the company's image as an employer)
A little late jumping on the bandwagon hype.
Yeah, I don't hate all ads. Occasionally I see one I like and try to buy stuff from the company that's advertising as a "thank god you're sane!"... It's just the other 95% of the ads that make diving for the remote and hitting mute a subconscious maneuver and AdBlock Plus a requirement.

I tried to block onlines ads myself - I used to use AdBlock (not Plus) with no downloaded filtersets - but I could not keep up, and they just kept getting more and more and more annoying.

I hate getting yelled at, basically.
Personally, I only ever block ads that I find offensive or obnoxious and I try not to block any from sites I want to "support".
I always find these announcements frustrating if you can't actually buy the product.

By the time, it gets to the US, it will probably be $300.
"much more important" is actually "much more expensive to cross".

Expensive lines make systems less flexible, not more. They lead to copies for efficiency, aka denormalization, which is another word for "bug waiting to happen". While this can be dealt with, doing so involves lots of nasty tradeoffs, with bugs a common outcome.

More to the point "more modular and more flexible" is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing good software.
"This dude does something mundane so thoroughly he turns it into fine art."
I think this really sums it up.

It's not very often you see something like this that is so focused upon acheiving perfection (or as close as possible). And I gained a bunch of respect for top flight car detailers.
congrats to the dropbox team!

Your fan,
Adam
scons has been my LaTeX build tool for a while now. Simple for simple builds, and nice that it's in Python.
Heh, try this for size: "I don't see how they have a monopoly on the operating system market. It is definitely the most popular and probably the best operating system, but there is definitely no limit on other adequate alternatives"

Microsoft got into trouble because they leveraged the popularity of one product (Windows) to push another (IE). Google will be fine provided they never release a feature on their website that requires Chrome. At that point, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
The article in Wikipedia is more informative:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Loongson
Loongson, the Chinese chip for Linux machines w/o x86 instructions
How to get your free car insurance quotes?
Gone are the days when we had to wait for our insurance agent to come and hand over the auto insurance quote. We believed that he operated with our best interest in mind because he was such a sweet talker! He was also a very busy man who says 'I managed to squeeze in a few minutes so that I can handover the quote to you.'
Project Fakebar: Improvising a Google Toolbar Substitute for Chrome
Run Chrome on Linux (with Wine)
The next ice age will balance everything out, don't worry :)
Same here, Dropbox is an amazing tool!

I use it with 2 different companies, one just to keep data in sync with my partner and I, the other to share data with sub-contractors for client work. I also keep multiple machines of my own in sync with it so I've got my files already on my laptop automatically.

Couldn't be happier, and I hope those guys are doing awesome and up to some exciting stuff!
How to Write a Spelling Corrector in Ruby
I've actually been using Fluid (http://fluidapp.com) for all my 24/7 stuff -- gmail, basecamp, github, hacker news ;) It really already does what Chrome's detachable websites feature kind of does, only better (for now at least, I'll give it time :).
This does not bode well for my $.99 whoopee cushion app which is almost done (serious) ... crud
Somewhat irrelevant:

On mosso... except for when you need to "dynamically" create subdomains
The Third Browser Wars
Maybe hire a guide? This guy, a tour guide in Tuscany, wrote some books make for light but entertaining reading:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?_encodin...

I think there's something to be said for simply wandering though (perhaps armed with some good books), especially seeing as how there is way more history and stuff to see in a place like Italy or France than you could possibly hope to absorb over a few weeks. It's "fractal", too: you can look at the big ticket items, like wars, conquests of this or that country, but you can also get into the local goings on, which are often quite interesting in their own right.

For instance, one of my favorite things in Padova is the University Tour, where they have a lectern that Galileo's students built for him. It's awful looking, because they were wealthy kids, not the sons of craftsmen, so they mangled it pretty thoroughly. They wanted to make it themselves though, rather than commission it, as a sign of dedication.
I think the ad is rather brilliant. The whole "wtf" vibe is what they were going for. You have to always remember that this ad and the followup ads are part of a much larger campaign that is basically going to be a saga of microsoft advertising. Think of this as one of the first few pages in a chapter within a long book.
And this strategy works out really well, too. 99% of people, the kind who will actually click on the ads, will just download Google's version and be happy. Hackers will switch to the ad-block-enabled version without any problems, and they wouldn't have clicked on the ads in any case.
It depends a lot on your project. For large C++ projects, I've found scons and boost jam painfully slow for iterative builds. For smaller things they're possibly nice because they're expressive and pretty simple.

AFAIK, either make or vanilla jam is the fastest for C++, which is by far the most important thing to me, but that'll vary depending on your particular situation.

This is a bit old, but still accurate: http://www.gamesfromwithin.com/articles/0509/000100.html
The 5 Most Laughable Terms of Service On the Net
"Google owns any content you create using its Chrome browser". What happened to their "don't be evil" slogan? This seems to go a little too far for my taste.
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"But why is it that so many people feel like they have a right to have their application sold in the iPhone App Store? Store owners do get to pick and choose what they're going to sell. You can't just come up with whatever lame product, show up at Best Buy or Amazon headquarters and demand that they start selling it in their stores. What in the world makes this guy or anyone else think the App Store is somehow an exception?"

Well, the problem is that Apple has made so that theirs is the only store in the world. If your store doesn't want to stock my book, it's not a problem, I can always go to the bookstore across the street and cut a deal with them. But if I write an app for the iPhone, the only place that I can sell it is the App Store.

That being the case, developers are going to see Apple being fickle about what apps are accepted/rejected, and they are going to start asking themselves is it worth the risk to spend 6 months developing an app just to discover that it can never even be put on the market.

Apple risks losing developers if they continue with this, and that doesn't help their cause.
I use gmail and google docs quite a bit and chrome they work a lot faster. But for the rest of my browsing needs it's Firefox all the way. I stopped using IE longtime ago.
The Sharepoint Central Administration web interface is not easy nor sexy to use. Most of the time you'll have to use the CLI STSADM instead, as simple tasks requires loads of clicks.
Interesting how my wishlist grew as I looked at theirs.
Crazy Arrington can't manage to snag a beta invite. Someone gave me one without me even asking, I didn't realize they were that exclusive.

I actually don't even use it...I should trade it with him for some PR. Hah.
thanks adam :) bummed im missing the show tomorrow, but we'll catch another!
thanks wayne!
sure it does...it says: "look at us, we are microsoft, we have a ton of money"
Here is an idea for someone to run with, a usb device that is like an articulated glove and can act as both input and output (it's a haptic control and a waldo) it would allow people to leave handwritten notes remotely, shake hands, play ping pong and possibly, just possibly allow for a universal implementation of the rslap protocol.
Is this the same guy who charges $20K for the wax job and makes his own wax?
i guess changing their image from boring old school corporate machine to just weird is a start
Password Gem: v1.2 Released
"the ad shows a normal conversation between two people."

maybe if those 2 people lived in the world of seinfeld it'd be normal... but I didn't feel it was very normal; it was weird like the sitcom

hmmm to me the message of the Apple ads isn't 'we are better than you', it's more like 'why put up with this crap anymore? life can be easier if you try something new'
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Agreed. It might be worthwhile to work on a project longer than a month to build a user base and accumulate enough useful feedback that might lead you into building what people want.

Project Mayhem is an interesting experiment. I bet some of your products might turn out to be better than more well-funded products.
Collection of free online dressup games and doll makers for girls 
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Ask HN: How do you share screenshots?
Here is my startup http://floomby.com. Floomby captures and shares screenshots.
What tools do you use to share screenshots?
I use evernote.com
So does this mean that the concept of a patent fails completely? You are allowed to make use of any patented technology for personal, non-commercial purposes. This machine, once fully mature, can conceivably make nearly anything. Will there be a napster for car parts?

I just love disruptive technology.
Were. If I were Reid Hoffman. Hypothetical statements about the present always require the past tense.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/conditional.htm
That was most definitely not a normal conversation.
Don't forget Ultimate Moist and Chewy ($500) and Enterprise Moist and Chewy ($750)
I use:
Printscreen + Adobe Photoshop + Gmail :)
I'm use PrintScreen on Mac and Apple Mail
Nice tool, it's for win but works on linux+wine even. Good luck!
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Skitch !
Stress and Class - No, it's not more stressful to be rich than poor
What's the best practice for communicating back to the server?

Is it
data = [CPURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:"http://myUrl"]
?
wait, this isn't the nine inch nails show in oakland tomorrow, right? regardless, congrats on the progress. i saw a pretty active dropbox thread on somethingawful.
Alt+Print Screen, paste to public Dropbox folder (Directory Opus supports screenshot paste), right click->copy public link
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i use kam studio and SnagIT . will try your tool too
Cory Doctorow: Macropayments
Either skitch, or just Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4 and paste into an iChat window.
It's for Mac only?
Ask HN: Best way to send MMS
We're trying to build a website that can send MMS messages to cellphones, worldwide.

It does not seem to be a technical problem (plenty of MMS gateways out there, SMTP2MMS providers, etc ...) but a business issue.

Basically, the impression I'm getting is that most carriers do not want 'small fish' like us to send MMS messages on their network without approval.

I'm disappointed with the state of MMS, makes me think of the locked-in world of WAP 8 years ago.

So: has any of you tackled this issue? Is there an easy solution or should we just accept this is going to be messy? Any pointers?
It looks like the Wikipedia article about your company was taken down already.

http://www.google.com/search?q=floomby+wiki

Sep 4, 2008 ... Floomby - internet service for sharing screenshots and files on the web. It was developed by Alexander Katasonov and Andrey Ivanichenko.

Do you have any relation to the individual posting in this thread as ivankuznetsov?
Dropbox rocks.
I use Jing: http://www.jingproject.com/

The way it works is really nice, it is easy to capture and share. Unfortunately the application is a bit too heavy for my laptop (1 gig memory etc). Starts really slow and takes up too much of memory.
I agree, it is too heavy and requires .NET Framework 3.0.
It would be good if the application shows a preview of screen capture before uploading

I am currently using Snagit
Mobo - comfortable online file management
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My main thought watching the advert was, "that's sad, Bill Gates steps down from running Microsoft, and now spends his time in discount shoe stores?"

I'm honestly not trying to take a dig at the ad, but it did feel rather tragic.
Definitely Skitch. Skitch is amazing.
Code Reuse in Google Chrome Browser
Same here, but the Ctrl isn't required.
Security Exploits to Google Chrome Browser Emerge
Introduction to Block Ciphers
GameQuery: javascript games with a jQuery plugin
Three different implementations of MapReduce
First look at Cappuccino and Objective-J
Jing not work for me on Windows XP SP2 + .Net 3.0 :(
Confirmed: Chrome coming to Android
What Marc Andreesen thinks about Google Chrome
Funny, I watched it and I though:

I guess they want to start the hero worship of bill gates. (Mind meld? A sign from above? Running into a store to be a personal servant?)
The only thing I was thinking while watching it is:

What in the world is bill gates doing in a shoe store? (Everyone knows he's a billionare.)

And: Why was seinfeld acting like his servant and/or worshiping him.
In my experience, books provide higher-quality tutorials to subjects than anything online. Not only that, but all of the information is in one place, saving you the time of searching through the masses of poorly-written and incomplete online tutorials.

However, online is better than reference books. It also has more information on the latest trends and practices. But, you must be a very active reader to even know where to look for the latest information. And, you need to be very knowledgeable in the field to filter good posts from bad.
Django, still amazing me after all these years
Sorry to harp on about Google's Chrome but - compiled JavaScript is just what you want to make JavaScript based games a practical proposition.
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Three prisoners were sitting in a U.S. jail, found guilty of "economic crimes" and were also comparing stories. The first one said, "I charged higher prices than my competitors, and I was found guilty of profiteering, monopolizing and exploiting consumers." The second one said, "I charged lower prices than my competitors, and I was found guilty of predatory pricing, cutthroat competing and under-charging." The third prisoner said, "I charged the same prices as my competitors, and I was found guilty of collusion, price leadership and cartelization."
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Imagine how much money you could save then and what you could buy using that money. The only problem most of us experience is the inability to find a reliable and legitimate TV download service that would deliver many shows and had no pay per download fees. I've been in your shoes and I must admit that it was hard even for a computer savvy person like me.
Accept it's messy. As long as big carriers are involved, you're going to see locked down monopolistic behaviours.

Basically:

- expect it to cost far more than you'd think

- don't count on any "big wholesale rebate" - it'll be insignificant even if you hit a respectable scale

- don't even bother talking to the carriers until you have a huge volume; as long as you're a small fry, you'll have to go through gateway providers

MMS is a still-born technology, imho, in large part because of the telco's involvement. First of all, it doesn't work half the time, secondly, it costs way more than it should, thirdly, it's almost impossible to make a viable business sending MMS's other than by being a gateway.
This reminds me of the huge campaign they ran a couple of years back, the one with the dinosaurs, I'm sure you remember it. The idea behind it was that a load of people in offices ran around with dinosaur heads. The point of the ads were that you were a dinosaur if you didn't upgrade to the new office.

However what the ad accomplished was that Microsoft got associated with dinosaurs - they managed to brand their own software as old and cranky.

I was absolutely flabbergasted that a company with that kind of resources couldn't at least find an intern to tell them that this was a really really bad idea. This looks like more of the same...
Google wouldn't make a Chrome-only feature, simply because then it wouldn't be available to the massive user base which doesn't use Chrome. Which is most people right now, and will probably continue to be most people.
If you have to explain an ad then it has failed.
I might use it for Google Apps. For those, Crome is and probably alway will be the fastest browser and for those they got all my private data already. I hesitate to allow them to store my complete browse and search history. I kind of beginning to feel watched by Google.
History shaped Google's Trojan Horse
Try 5 years

;-)
HP's 'End Run' Around Windows
I enjoy Cory Doctorow for those invaluable gems that he comes up with every once in a while. This is definitely one of them.

One to think about, and a definite must-read if you're any sort of writer.
It is if you want to put the screenshot in the clipboard rather than on the Desktop.
Let's find out what happens - I just posted the comment to the site :-)

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/09/where_is_the_...