skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An argument for .Net in startups - to wit, avoiding groupthink
Although I don't use it, I think that Bing has forced google to up its game. I doubt the recent Panda update would have been as soon, as widespread (it even had a follow on update), or as publicized if not for bing.

Guess that's not really research.
HP needs to partner with some corporations to design and develop some business/industry heavy applications specifically tailored to the partners business models so the new Pre and Touchpad will cash in on the private sector where RIM has dropped the ball. I owned a Palm Pixi and Pre, the Pixi construction was shotty, but they basically gave them away. The Pre is a solid device and if it weren't for the ghost town of apps in comparison to iOS the device would be a lot more functional then given credit. I think were going to see as a lot more of HP and webOS come summer, why do you think they keep running all these headlines...
ah perfect, just what I was looking for. thanks!
"Implement one-click shopping with a different mechanism and the patent doesn't apply."

What different mechanism? What different mechanism implements one-click shopping that isn't one-click shopping?

I'm serious. Lay it out for me. Then, if you manage to get that far, explain what your difference has that the B&N implementation didn't have. Don't just handwave.

"I haven't read the claims(and I'll bet that you haven't either)"

Wrong.

In fact...

"They're about disclosure..."

If you have any programming skills, you should go read the patent and see just how much is "disclosed". First, sit down and sketch out what you would need to implement in order to create a one-click ordering system. No, seriously, sketch out the basic systems on paper. Then go read the patent. Then boil out the legalese. Then observer that your sketch and what the patent contains has roughly the same amount of information.

You are at a disadvantage until you do this, by the way, because like I said, I have read this, and several other such patents. You need to read at least one before continuing on. And ask yourself the question, exactly how much help are these patent applications in implementing a solution to the given problem to one "skilled in the art"? This is part of the reason software patents are so stupid, they almost all completely fail this test. You cited one of the handful of counterexamples already, but an exception it very much is.

"Patents have nothing to do with encouraging people to create alternative solutions."

You need to brush up on your patent defenses if you're going to spend any time defending them. They're for the purposes of promoting innovation, and the stimulation of alternate solutions is one of the big ways they do this. It is only a recent perversion of the goals of IP that they are solely intended to serve as property and create gatekeepers and therefore allow people to block innovation as they see fit.
I guess you're saying, why didn't I just tell the other company "yes," and then reneg if Google accepted me?

For one thing, I don't like pulling crap like this.

I might have anyway, except that it would have damaged existing and longstanding relationships in the other (non-Google) company that are worth maintaining to me.
Same thing happened to me. I contribute to many projects, I even spent my time for some Google projects. A lot of time actually. I had an offer with another great company, and they told me to let them extend it for another week. I did the interview process at Google, and did two phone interviews and one onsite. I thought I did pretty well, but I was waiting for their reply back for a week, and no reply. Then I pinged them, they apologized and said they are waiting for references. I pinged them again for another week, no reply yet. Then I accepted the other job because Google's Hiring process sucks so much, that it tells you right there that they don't care about their employees. I spent time out of my own work life to do interviews, and they can't bother to email us in the recommended timeframe. They said within 4 days, but 14 days ... Working for a company like that would seem disastrous.
This number of factual errors in such a short story is amazing:

1. The total number of daily tweets is well over 100M (not 10M)

2. The 10% sampling corresponds to the gardenhose access level, and I'm seeing over 15M tweets going through "Truthy" every day.

3. Johan and Xiao-Jun are professors, not a students.

4. Johan, Huina are at IU, not Cornell

5. Xiao-Jun is in Manchester, not Cornell
my odesk secret: only pitch developers you want to work for you. The inbound stuff is all crap, where as I've found several awesome developers and designers who I contact via email on a regular basis, and bill all work through oDesk.
Kinect is the closest I can think of. Not sure if you live in that world.
For number 2. you could argue that they are mercantilist. Most of the enterprises are state backed, much like the Dutch or British East India companies. So the state takes a pretty big role in determining which companies will succeed.
Right. To add to this, in the US system:

-- the vast majority of bureaucrats with power over the average man are not elected or even subject to firing

-- we do not truly have a system of one man/one vote. the guy who writes the new york times headlines on election day literally controls at least a million votes.

-- the candidates who are dubbed "serious" by the media are not chosen at random. By any quantitative theory of political voice, that up front winnowing from 300 million to ten or so is more substantive than the election itself.

-- in the business sector, power is wielded with far more responsibility. there is a CEO and an identifiable company behind a product, which can go out of business if it displeases its customers, and which is subject to feedback on an instantaneous basis through purchases. by contrast most govt projects are products of committees, with permanent funding and diluted accountability only in the form of the 2-4 year election cycle.

in short, voting with your wallet or voting with your feet means far greater efficacy and voice than going through the ceremony of voting with a ballot.

-- Rule by an elite is inevitable. The process by which that elite is selected is everything. The US used to be much more aware of this, referring to itself as a "republic" rather than a "democracy".

-- The Chinese model is a lot easier to understand when comparing it to Apple. Should Steve Jobs choose his successor through a plebiscite in which he ostensibly has the same voice as a retail store employee hired yesterday? Or should he choose a leader who he thinks will follow his path? In the latter case legitimacy among Apple employees ultimately rests on the bottom line success of Apple, with the necessary safety valves being exit (freedom to quit) and market (revenue growth) rather than voice (noisily protesting Jobs' successor).

In the same way, most Chinese believe that Deng was the best qualified person in China to choose his successor. And legitimacy comes from continually posting solid bottom line numbers, something the US has not done for a while.
MS research has produced a lot of stuff that is directly used in games today. Hugh Hoppes research on vertex cache optimization and SHPRT has been a shipping part of the DirectX SDK for years for example. Recently MS Research published a paper that greatly reduced Kinect latency that is likely to make its way into games and other applications.

I'm not as aware of other research to product transitions, but I imagine a lot of MS research's work has moved to .NET (I think F# might have started as a MS Research project?) Microsoft Research is one of the strongest divisions right now, they produce a lot of cool stuff, practical or not.
How To Keep Your To-Do List Manageable?
Bill Gates is a savvy guy, but come on, he is the chairman of the board of directors of a Fortune 50 company. What's he going to say -- he was tepid on the deal they just spent $8.5 billion on? Boards don't operate like this (that is to say, boards don't air their internal disagreements or criticize sitting management in public).
It's pretty hard to call webOS a chopping block item. I'm sure they know better than to kill it off before any momentum is gained. They just _barely_ released the Veer. Regardless of what they claim of reviews, time still needs to play out towards what seems to be their bigger bet: the webOS TouchPad.
How to create a Facebook landing page
Every few weeks or so I'm contacted by the same Google recruiter asking if I'm interested in an engineering opportunity.

After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered: "Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at <proceeds to list out my LinkedIn>."

Awful. Plus I'm a shitty programmer.
They seem to be doing work on that. Granted, their new hardware is just barely coming along with the Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad. Time will tell how much of the old Palm designs they can fix.
Yep.

Re: Google's word-of mouth reputation:

On the one hand, I feel kind of stupid bitching about my experience with Google, even though it really did happen. I don't like bitching.

On the other hand, as we hackers talk about this kind of issue at Google, maybe they'll eventually listen and shape up a bit if there really are systemic problems, and that's a win for everyone.

I actually tried giving Google "suggestions," though I don't think it made an impact (which is to be expected and understandable).
I was half joking. I was interviewed once, a couple years ago, and I wasn't really a good match to what they were looking for (they wanted a C programmer, my C is very rusty, I am much more an evangelist than anything else). There are very few technical positions where I live and I was not willing to move to Belo Horizonte (which is where most of Google's tech staff are in Brazil) for personal reasons.

Not a lot of drama in this story.
BlackDiamond X8: For when you need 192 40GigE ports in a single switch
Didn't the MS Surface come out of the MS Research division.

edit: From wikipedia:

The product idea for Surface was initially conceptualized in 2001
by Steven Bathiche of Microsoft Hardware and Andy Wilson of
Microsoft Research.
If I had the ability to downvote, "M$" would be an automatic downvote regardless of the rest of the content.
Well, I know Googlers pretty well. Even internally, they say their hiring process really sucks. Not one person told me this, 80% of the people I talked to told me the same thing. I personally wont blame the interviewers or the recruiters, they are doing their job. I blame their messed up Hiring Committee. I don't understand why the hiring committee can't collaborate with the interviewers and hiring manager to hire a person. Everything is done through writing, and the hiring committee does everything quietly on their own. I even wonder, is the hiring committee a computer?
What kind of programming languages/stack are you more familiar with? Usually, Wordpress should really fit all your blogging needs. It's easy and has a lot of SEO tools to go with it.

But as I am not at all comfortable with Wordpress' issues that surfaced a while back: upgrade, security etc., so I plan to use one of the Django blog platform. But that means I'm not blogging at all, but worrying more about how to have the blog installed.

There seems to always be a trade off. But one thing is for sure, you should choose to install Wordpress or any chosen bloggin platform on your domain rather than having it redirect to another domain... like blogger, wordpress.com etc.

Good luck and good writing.
So to instigate a war all you'd have to do is be part of a group like Anonymous, throw out some subtle misinformation that made it seem you were acting on behalf of a government entity, then wallah, war.
I'd suggest taking some bioinformatics/computational biology classes at Stanford/Berkeley/major university wherever you are. You'll learn some algorithms, and data structures related to bioinformatics and probably work on a class project. Do well, and I'm sure the professor has connections in industry to help you out.
Exit SVN, Enter Git
unfortunately externalising costs and risks are just fundamentally part of corporations by incentive than the choice of some hiring managers
I think a large part of this is that smart phone buyers are likely on either cheap phones (barely hitting android on the lowest end) or contract phones. Signing a two year contract or putting down $600+ to get a phone is not a commitment most people make unless they trust the brand. HP is out of luck with phones IMO... I'd play the TouchPad angle the most and strongly consider doing an iPod touch like device if I were them.
You know who complains about Google's hiring process... people that don't get hired by Google. I've never heard anybody who WAS hired by Google complain about anything.

Maybe you all just weren't good enough. That's OK, not everybody is the creme-a-la-creme. Look at Google's market cap and Android and Chrome's growth (not to mention their dominance in search and advertising)... Google doesn't need you, and that's why they didn't hire you.

You can cry a river about how Google is "failing" because they didn't hire you... but I think their shareholders (who Google makes very rich) would laugh right in your face and be glad that they didn't hire a whiner like you.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who was not hired by Google that didn't become bitter. I was treated with respect, was put up in a nice hotel, met very smart people, answered (and didn't ;) very tough questions. In the end it didn't work out. I had a blast nonetheless.
What’s Your Conventional Wisdom (and how is it keeping you from winning)?
Um ... thanks!?
Collaboration alone is worth a ton. Even if the document is stuck in word for formatting at the end, docs makes it ridiculously easy to pass around edits.
When it came out I thought Palm had the best app model of all the mobile platforms out there. Its a shame they could not push it enough. Of course they ran out of money and HP was not aggressive enough with it. If they do cut it though it would be unfair as they never really did anything with the platform.
My Ardyss Journey: Internet Marketing Manual For Ardyss Reps
You Will Totally Work for This Start-Up
What are the data sources? Can I source from SQL Server, Oracle, DB2? OLAP engines? If not, while still better than nothing, not really a first class solution for most of my users. But great for soccer moms (seriously -- our team mom will flex on you with pivot tables for the soccer team).
To be fair, Google doesn't just interview guys..

People constantly using "guy" and "programmer"/"computer scientist" interchangeably might be part of the reason why so many women avoid computer science.
I don't do .NET currently, but did up until about a year ago and my main dev tools were Emacs and msbuild. I almost never fired up VS.
holy fucking wow. I knew that tumblr rocked, but not that much.
San Francisco’s Real Multi-Billion-Dollar War
Use a language that makes gluing easier, and you can scale this strategy further. Confer Wadler's "Why functional programming matters".
Especially when I may often as not be getting this email from my phone where I don't necessarily want to have to click through to your web-app.
No, in fact it's been available in FP10 since October 2008.
They do remind me of Ned Flanders - "okely dokely doo!" just a bit. I doubt that's a widespread association but it's what jumps in my mind first.
Yah, it totally doesn't target the 0.1% of people who do this! HOW LAME IS GOOGLE WITH THEIR FREE-TO-USE SOFTWARE!?!?!

In all seriousness, this is much more useful than to just soccer moms.
Hey Hysterix, I'm the author of the post.

First off, I've been doing web development for about 8 years and I've been using both PHP and .NET for most of that time.

Based on your clear bias, I'm guessing you're basing your opinions of Microsoft's development tools solely based on your experience with older versions of IE. This isn't really a valid way to judge technology, any more than it's valid to judge the quality of Google Maps based on experiences with Google Wave. IE and .NET are two completely separate entities. It's also worth noting that we all have to deal with cross-browser issues regardless of what server side tools we use.

You clearly have some dislike for Microsoft as an organization, but most of your statements here are unsubstantiated and completely irrelevant to .NET. An actual developer knows how to choose technologies based on what best fits the project, not based on personal opinions.
Google cannot find people to hire fast enough even by its own admission. I have personally never applied to work at Google but I can understand why someone who never anything heard back from a company with over 20,000 people would be a little pissed.
How To Build a Web App When You’re The Sales Guy
Fairfax journalist Ben Grubb questioned after Facebook security story
I don't want to be overtly negative here, but this document is a philosophical terror.

I recognize that you wrote it out of inspiration and tried to encapsulate it to an abbreviated timeframe, but where you seem to want to espouse productivity and forward thinking, you have instead illustrated what I would describe as, at best, a destructive and dishonest personality.
How about nothing at all? If he truly thought the deal sucked, there are a lot of politically correct ways to feign corporate enthusiasm without saying "I was a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done."

He's pretty much personally endorsing the deal, which is not savvy if he's tepid on it.
I was hired by Google, but shortly after getting my offer my recruiter, who was in charge of getting me placed with a team, disappeared. Presumably he was fired or quit, but no one ever gave me a reason; he simply stopped responding to my emails, and then a week later his voicemail wouldn't let me leave a message.

At that point, I contacted his boss, who thanked me for "letting her know". A few days later I got a call from my new recruiter, who was going on vacation the following day for two weeks. I didn't end up getting placed with a team until about three weeks later.

It's not exactly a horror story, but it wasn't a great first impression either. Other engineers I talked to had similar stories.
I think I've made about 7 of them.
did you forget ahem, MS.NET?
I'd say the hope is that Palm has the capability to do just that with the resources HP brings (cash flow and other existing hardware vendor relationships).

I'm skeptical that it will be an iPhone like explosion in any case and people expecting that to happen because a product is good should start getting ready for disappointment. That sort of growth is a factor of many more things than just the product. Apple nailed a lot more than the product the first round and that momentum has allowed them to fix the rather mediocre start with the iPhone.

I will say that I've just barely taken the webOS plunge and I like it. It's everything I expected and that's a good thing since I'm a picky user (having owned both iOS and Android phones, I've never felt satisfied with either).
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
I disagree with article's conclusion that they are selecting for "backend" engineers. They are selecting for people that think over-engineering every little data structure is the way to build good programs. The skill software companies need is the ability to get a hundred subsystems tested and working together, which is totally different.

I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm, which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case.

In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school but haven't ever built anything.
Chomsky denied the Cambodian Holocaust while it was occurring and has never apologized or really publicly reckoned with this. He also keeps his fortune in tax shelters while inveighing against others who do the same. I would thus take his comments about the manifold evils of business with a wee grain of salt; the regimes he has unapologetically flacked for have killed many more people than Google has.
What are the odds that the new process comes out before Java 7?
However, Microsoft has been running their
Bizspark program for a few years, which
eliminates most of the startup costs normally
associated with employing a .NET framework.

The problem with BizSpark is that it is a ticking time bomb.

When starting a business, you don't really know what will happen in 3 years, but only one thing is certain -- the path to success usually takes more than 3 years.

And unless you've got VC money to burn irresponsibly, why build on top of a stack that you'll probably have to replace? Does it provide more value than the alternatives? When it comes to web services, all evidence is to the contrary.

At Piehead, we build web applications on a faster
pace than almost any startup

This is an unsupported anecdotal evidence.

It also seems incorrect based on the sheer number of businesses I've seen doing kick-ass work with non-MS technologies.

programmers start to choose technologies based
on that cultural perception, rather than focusing
on the best approach for the kinds software they
want to build

This implies that .NET is the best approach for certain kinds of software - the article does nothing to name them. Which is IMHO, not the best way to advocate for the usage of .NET.

And again, all evidence is to the contrary - most popular web-services online are not built with MS technologies, with a few exceptions that you could count by using the fingers on one hand. And what else, other than ASP.NET-powered web applications? For client-apps targeted to consumers? For mobile apps? Again, all evidence is to the contrary.

Besides the price and the interoperability story - another reason would be that Microsoft is currently a follower.

Besides a couple of exceptions, which are small in scope, Microsoft currently does nothing but to copy ideas taken from (shock and horror) open-source projects. Sorry, but innovation happens somewhere else.

I also like being able to be in control. Even if I don't know the internals of some component I'm using, I like being able getting in touch with the core developers of that component and ask them nicely or pay them directly to fix it for me. And if that component is valuable to me, I also like being able to improve it myself.

Open-source gives you that, Microsoft software doesn't.
iCal and Google Calendar have 'natural' event creation? They have a menu icon with a small app that resides there? Etc..

Try it out. See what's different for yourself.
Eh, I'm going to disagree with you there. Qt on OS X still produces dramatically non-standard looking UIs.

I don't think papering over the significant differences in UI paradigms between Windows and OS X is something that is fundamentally solvable by a widget toolkit. You can make a toolbar full of buttons work on both platforms, but you can't solve the fact that cramming 40 buttons onto a toolbar feels completely non-native under OS X.
I don't like iCal at all. It's too clumsy in almost every respect. The Lion update looks like a step in the wrong direction, too. The only promising feature is the natural language parsing, which IMO is an essential feature of a calendar.

I'm not sure how I feel about Fantastical, since I've only had it installed for 5 minutes. I've tried other iCal replacements like BusyCal, but they didn't seem like enough of an improvement.

There's definitely a space for simple NLP calendar input on the desktop, though.
What is hackerne.ws (mirror of HN)? Could be phishing or SEO spamming?