skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them.

the problem they are solving is that windows, as it currently exists, is dragging around 20 years of cruft. the weight of all that cruft is slowly strangling microsoft to death. they can do it now, or they can do it later, but sooner or later, windows will have to be scrapped and replaced with something else altogether.

look what a great move it was for apple. painful in the short-term, big win in the long-term.
The principal of your school is your princely pal. Hopefully he has principles.
I think they'll do it this time. They'll get the legacy stuff in a "blue box" (or was it yellow box) the same way that Mac OSX did. If they can make Office work, that's game, set, and match.

Look, the OSVs only choices are Windows and Ubuntu. Ain't no one going to try to sell Ubuntu to Enterprise Rent A Car (pick your old school, massive install of choice).
Ask YC: Critique my side-project
I mentioned this in other comments, but private roads, highways, canals, and railroads (even one of the four great transcontinentals) had a long and successful history in the United States before the rise of public monopolies. Since it is clearly possible to build even very expensive infrastructure by private means, we have to ask if it fair or efficient to do otherwise. Is it okay to tax people in California to pay for highway boondoggles in Massachusetts? Is it in society's best interest for infrastructure to be built by entities that have a history of being behind schedule and over budget? Is it wise to build more highways than the free market would provide in order to have cheap transit when all side effects are considered? I'm not sure.
Yes, around 20.
let me know when people stand in line for three hours to get a windows mobile phone. tell me the next time a wall street trading house does a re-architect and move to windows
I've been working on it for 7 years.
Thanks..do you recommend any books, tutorials other than CLRS ? Do I need to learn advanced algorithms like tries,suffix trees, vertex cover etc. What kinds of coding problems can I expect from Google ?
How dare ye. You stole my link from reddit. Actually SISC is a well known in the jvm community. I really shouldn't have posted it there either.
I wrote this last weekend because I was getting so overwhelmed with job lead emails and interview programming tasks that I was sure I was dropping promising leads on the floor, but couldn't remember which ones. Worse yet, since I couldn't decide what to work on, I ended up working on nothing and watching YouTube videos instead.

It should be pretty self-explanatory (I hope), but the basic idea is to remove as many decisions as possible from your to-do list, so that the computer just tells you what to do, you do it, and then you go back for more. It's also tracking what & when you complete, and I hope to add some views in the near future that show you everything you've done over time as an additional motivational boost.

I'm not sure whether it's a startup, a side-project, or just a personal tool yet, but I'll be listening to any and all feedback and probably implementing a lot of it. Still not sure whether I want to jump back into the startup world or go get a job, though I suspect that the job offers won't last long if I keep delaying their interview problems to work on side projects. I figured I had this idea, I needed it myself, it'd only take a weekend to implement, and then I kept coming up with cool new ideas for features.

Any and all feedback is appreciated. If it's something people find useful, I'll probably ELance out the design (my aesthetic sense is terrible) and maybe find a new name, since WhatShallIDoNow doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I'd particularly like to know whether the concept itself is something folks would use.
I was more attracted to project based courses when I was there in graduate school. Other professors that I liked very much, one is Ken Perlin and another is Denis Zorin. It was the real learning experience to build graphic stuffs from scratch.

I didn't take Dennis Shasha's class. But his heuristic learning and distributed computing are also project based.
You ask about how many open source projects I manage. None. I am a completely private sector guy.

So you pretty much don't get Open Source. And that's OK. There's plenty of room for both commercial and Open Source development. But, it nullifies your claims on the topic, since you've established you do not share, or comprehend, the mindset of Open Source developers.

We fixed it because we had a time motive, resources, and focus. Right there: done. No hesitating, we needed to move onto something else. That kind of focus would certainly help OSS.

What makes you think OSS needs help? I think Apache just called to remind you not to teach your granny how to suck eggs.

You're making the very common mistake of assuming Open Source software is for you. Open Source software is for the developer of the software. If anybody else likes it, that's wonderful. But it's not (generally) the reason it exists. It exists because someone wanted to build something. Sometimes they also want to build a business around the software they build, in which case they have to answer all of the needs of commercial software, in addition to keeping an Open Source community happy (which makes it a doubly hard challenge, but it brings some advantages, as well).

Anyway... That may very well explain why private projects move faster than open source ones, the private ones have a profit motive, failure means financial failure.

And it may explain why OSS projects, in general, have dramatically higher quality code. Motivations are different. "Needs" are determined by hackers...not marketing guys, MBAs, or even (perhaps to the detriment of user friendliness) customers.

Though I question your unfounded assertion that proprietary projects move faster, and I think you need to be specific. Does Microsoft innovate faster than the Linux developers? How about Apple? Would Apple be where they are today without FreeBSD and Mach?

I would concur that proprietary software companies sometimes move faster on usability. Certainly Microsoft has better accessibility than Gnome and Linux. But Linux has better large systems support than Microsoft or Apple (but not as good as Sun...though Solaris is now Open Source, I think we can give this point to the proprietary side, since most of the features were developed by a single company and before Solaris was fully Open Source). Likewise small systems support, where Linux has a very solid lead over Microsoft and Apple (and Sun). Hardware support is also better in Linux than both Windows Vista and Apple OS X (and Solaris). So who is moving faster?

And, to come back to Apache...name any proprietary product that does half of what Apache can do or gets support for new protocols sooner.

Open Source developers and commercial developers have different priorities. Your priority seems to be condescension. ;-)

No matter how altruistic you are, if you fail financially, you don't eat.

Altruism isn't the point of most Open Source software.
I live in San Diego! Go... Padres (is it?)
Well, I think until fairly recently the backwards compatible group had it right. Windows had way too much going on in the corporate world to even consider it. But now in the era of (relatively) good virtualization and lots of cool web apps running on a nearly ubiquitous internet, the other group's argument has gotten a lot stronger. That's sort of the catch-22 for Microsoft though, because the exact same arguments make OSX an option for more users.

I think MS is a little behind on this, but only a little. Still I hope they don't ditch the Windows brand name, it's clearly one of the most successful of all time. Isn't midori a watermelon liqueur?
Oh, sorry.

With a hand-crank you could get about 63.108 poundal-furlongs per lunar year, so... given all six billion humans you could generate that much energy in... uhh, 5.2 * 10^27 fortnights.
c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them.

i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.
who needs virtualization anyway? salesforce is doing just fine...most of msft's bread and butter apps are moving to the web
Was that discussion Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost The API War" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)?
Teen Social Network myYearbook Gets $13 Million
The white things are LIDAR units. It's a laser range finder often used for robotics car competitions. It's the most accurate way to measure distance.

If you wonder how it works: the unit has a spinning mirror. It sends out pulses of laser light as the mirror spins and measures how quickly the light takes to return after it hits an object to return to a sensor on the unit. If you know how fast light moves and have a fast processor, you can measure distance.)

Because they are being used sideways, they sweep from sky to ground measuring distance. They are probably being used to "map" buildings as they drive by, so that the data could be used to create better 3D maps.

(They aren't perfect: reliability includes a variety of factors including environment [how do bushes and trees affect laser measurement] and distance [range may only be 50ft for instance])
"even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them."

Never underestimate what a crazy marketing department with a budget of hundreds of millions can do.
Your comment was probably modded down since it didn't seem terribly well informed, nor to add much to the conversation. Are you sure you understand quite how much energy 10^45 joules is? And the fact that they have absolutely no idea how said energy would be applied anyway?

Come 1944, Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up in smoke and radiation.

Really? Did they rebuild them so they could get nuked again in 1945?
Long-Lasting Jetpack Unveiled at Air Show
This isn't exactly new. What is the new part they are covering in the news?
It looks like the hybrid is produced by extracting the entire face from the second photo and fitting it onto the face frame of the first. I get a complete match with the resultant face by doing this in Photoshop.

If this is right, then the program is agnostic to individual facial features, as in it's everything from the eyebrows to the lips, or nothing.

Also, if this is right, would there be privacy implications to the person whom the face is extracted from? If you are protecting the privacy of the person whose face is swapped out, then it makes sense that only their frame remains, but the hybrid face is very similar to the original face (second photo).
Kind of like whatthefuckdoineedtoknow.com?
I think that is more of a cult of personality issue. The iPhone is a great product, but waiting in line for hours for it is more of a super-fan thing to do. I saw the papers and the articles so I know it happened, but I sure don't know anyone who waited in line. A lot of people also wait in lines for video games and movie tickets but they are not the masses, they are the hardcore fringe fans.
Nice find, that's exactly right.
This is exactly what they're going to do.

I think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might be. Microsoft has a bunch of really smart people sitting in Research working on this stuff.

Just think how cool this will be if they make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X, and Apple made that jump with far less resources.
The article seems to indicate that this is something being done by Microsoft Research (MSR). In that case, there's no telling when it will be done, or if it is, whether it will even be used for a commercial version of Windows. MSR works more or less independently from the business divisions of the company.

Of course, if things turn out really well and there is a strong business case then there is every reason to think it would be adopted. But what clearly won't happen is what people are prediction (hoping?) elsewhere in this thread, that work will be poured into this and the ambitiousness of this project will cause Windows to be delayed. If this never sees the light of day than the actual Windows team will just keep on chugging along at whatever their plan A is.
It may be how copyright does work, but it's not how it should work.

Money has been made off of Scrabble for 50 years. Maybe enough is enough?
It's easy to think all companies rely on apache on Linix as you do. However, in the "real world" a bazillion companies depend on Windows to run stuff. And a lot of those companies depend on the software that was built for windows 3.1, NT, 2000 and XP. Not the latest and greatest. As such, MSFT has to maintain backward compatibility. If they start screwing with corporate customers and backwards compatibility they're going to have the department of justice so far up their asses...well you get the picture.

Windows runs the world. I'm sorry I know the internet is hosted on a lot of Linix servers but in small, medium and large businesses there a LOT of windows servers keeping everything running.
Yup. It's prevalent in Tokyo and seems to be very effective.
Do they really need to explain themselves? I'm on board with the knol has been linked from every major site with a high PR and most likely helped increase the page rank. But even if google gave it an extra push or piggy backed on the google.com domain, isn't that within their right? Its THEIR site, they can do whatever they want. I don't want to defend them and empower them to manipulate results at a cost of control. But what it comes down to is, if it pisses enough people off they will take their search somewhere else (cuil did just launch, HAH!). Also want to throw out that a search for "site:knol.google.com" brings back 1,500 results. I don't know if thats a major concern yet.
but it is wrong that Apple forces safari downloads on windows! grrr!
The problem that Singularity attempts to solve is keeping the OS from collapsing under its own weight as it grows. (Sound familiar?) Faster, more reliable code that can evolve quickly.

http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/
I had to wait in line because I'd just gotten back from Asia and wasn't about to sign a 3-year BlackBerry contract when I could wait a couple weeks for the iPhone -- so by the time it arrived, I needed a phone badly.

In front of me were a couple of teenyboppers with no idea what the iPhone even cost (and didn't much care, their parents picked up the tab). Behind me was a DJ who knew every tidbit of iPhone gossip imaginable, definitely a hard-core Apple fan.

That the teenyboppers showed up tells me that it is something more than just a "cult of personality" that attracts Apple fans. It hits consumer culture in just the right spot to be a mass market hit.
That's incorrect... Terms of service states...

5.1. No Google Ownership of User Content. Google claims no ownership or control over any content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through the Service. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any content you submit, post or display on or through the Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.
have you seen http://nowdothis.com ?

it looks very similar, but as simple as it really should be.
You can check out my response on my blog for the clarification. I suppose it was a bit awkwardly worded at first.
That remains to be seen. Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming, both in terms of quality and uptake, and nobody's sure what if anything MSFT is doing there. It's a fallacy (though a very common one among the tech-savvy) to act as if web-based Offices pose any threat at all. They may, of course, but there's no sign of that yet.

Also virtualization isn't about Microsoft's products, they'll just write new ones for any new OSes. It's about the legacy code businesses everywhere run on.
Cool? I write a list into Terminal and just follow that.
haha, funny read.
Hmm, no, I hadn't. And yeah, it's basically the same concept - though I've got some additional ways of getting data in, like bookmarklet & e-mail. How long have they been around, and does anyone actually use it?

Edit: Their blog says they're at 10k uniques/day after being around for a week, so it looks like there's some interest in this...
Life after Techmeme
If you're fixated on airplanes and space flight, no wonder you feel like you're surrounded by the world of the past. You're living in the past!

It's true that aircraft are a stagnant, mature technology and have been for decades. For the airplane nut, that's a terrible thing, but just imagine what the poor railroad fans have gone through, or the nuclear power fans, or the horse-and-buggy fans. I'm a sailor, myself, and sailing tech just hasn't had the same level of excitement since the invention of steam-powered shipping in the mid-19th century.

This sentence says it all:

the main technological innovation since 1958 has been space flight, and it's daughter technology: microelectronics.

Yeah, I guess my iPhone could be considered a daughter technology of the Apollo project... but only in the sense that Microsoft Windows is a daughter technology of the Xerox machine. Which is to say: They had the same parents, and were arguably related at birth, but they haven't spoken in years, and the child has grown and grown while the parents have been retired for years, and now nobody but the grandparents can still see the family resemblance.

Meanwhile, although you can plausibly argue that modern computing is a logical extension of the known or anticipated technology of 1958... the same logic can be used to argue that aviation has been stagnant for five hundred years, ever since Leonardo da Vinci first sketched a helicopter. In other words -- with all due respect to McCarthy and Vannevar Bush and the other visionaries of the 1940s and 1950s -- there's a big difference between envisioning the future and actually building it and living in it.
Ehh I disagree with point number 2. I've been writing a big app in Erlang lately and SA has actually made my program longer. i.e.

rec(Lst) ->
case Cond of
pattern1 ->
rec(Lst);
pattern2 ->
Lst2 = ...
rec(Lst2);
...

I'd like to rebind Lst in pattern2's clause and then just call rec(Lst) at the end of the case. (Of course there can be many more than 2 clauses and all the rec/1 calls really add up.)
Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming

time and the trends are on their side. google docs shows the possibility. once web systems evolve to better handle these type of apps, the advantage will play to them more and more
I think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might be.

whatever will be "game changing" in 2012, my guess is that it won't be a new version of windows, or any other desktop os

make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X

yeah that was about the time apple nearly went under. how soon people forget
The free market isn't the best solution for every problem. Imagine if firemen worked like American doctors and wouldn't deal with you unless you were properly insured, or police who only helped those who could afford it or had paid their protection dues.

Some things really do benefit the whole herd and and everyone needs to contribute whether they like it or not. I'm all for minimal government where the free market works, but it's not the right solution to every problem.

Profit can't be the only motive for doing things, some things must be done because it's simply the right thing to do and profiting off of it just wouldn't be right.

Society might not be required to feed and cloth you, but it should damn sure protect you from other members of society, and it should step in and do things to prevent the free market from damaging the one world we all have to share, like decent public transportation to reduce the need for everyone to drive and continually pollute the environment.
I believe the general mindset in most places is: "Public place, public property" meaning that if you are out "in public," you have no right to complain about others being able to see you, or take pictures that might have you in them. You are out in a public area and have no right to remove the freedom of others to take pictures of public areas. If you don't want to be in them, avoid the cameras, stay inside, or wear a veil (or mask, hoodie, etc.).

The issue is in deciding when the others (Google, in this case) abuse their freedom to take pictures. Where should we draw the line? Obviously cameras should be allowed in public places. Should pictures of others only be permitted for private use? Google wants to use the pictures with you in it to make them money. The paparazzi have a lot of freedom in taking and publishing pictures of others. Is this the same as what Google is doing? Is what the paparazzi doing crossing the line also?
I haven't had a Google interview, but looking at their past and current problems for the Google Code Jam would certainly get you some practice.
I remember reading something like this somewhere.

It goes along the following lines: The only good thing about MS Win. are the ubiquitous driver support and secondly their programming API (since 90% of the desktop code + office + ... etc... depend on those APIs). However the rest (ie. the kernel, the gui, especially the kernel) suck. Therefore, the right thing to do is to trash the kernel and just use something else. It would be pretty easy for MS to write a compatibility layer for their drivers to say... the linux kernel (if we don't care about drivers, I would actually use FreeBSD as it is more stable and secure). Since, their compatibility layer does not include any major portion of the kernel and can be considered a separate module under the GPL (Nvidia and ATI do something like this already so it works), they can lock up the source to their pleasure and charge $150/license from us (and like $3/license from Dell et al.) and still make their nice cushy profits. Think ndiswrapper on steroids. You plug in the compat layer, point it to the Win32 drivers and magic: devices work. This works for MS. As shown, they still geto to make their cushy profits and get their lock in monopoly. If they do the same to their APIs on the app side, they can control the office market as well. It works for all those servers and stuff because they get to use the FreeBSD kernel with all the stability and server goodness that comes with it and it works for me because i take the compat layer, stick FreeBSD on top of it and happily go on bash-ing away this time with full driver support.

Furthermore, the compat layer and API layers are relatively thin with (hopefully) none of the really complex stuff like VM management, file systems, and CPU schedulers so it should be much much easier for MS to push out good code (they could even cut down their development budget and make even more money). Happy faces all around.
Nice to see something positive mentioned about the project. As hackers, it's our job to cheer on projects like this and not focus on the parent company.

Good luck to the team playing with the concept.
Safari is by far the most usable. You've got to be joking. And what does Firefox have in terms of usability that Opera doesn't have?
One shouldn't be looking for a job "in C++ or Java." You should be looking for a job in which your task is to solve problems. The choice of language comes second (unless you are an elite hacker and can dictate your terms).