skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft have released some great products in the last few years; Xbox and Windows Phone are a couple. Xbox has obviously done extremely well and WP is only going to grow with their partnership with Nokia. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these were both the result of starting from scratch with a smaller, more agile team who have permission to do something different and new. This works; even for Microsoft.

I also feel that maybe similar to Marco Arment's comments on the benefits of the new features in iOS on Instapaper, this may be the case for MSFT. If Apple can pave the way to making consumers' understand or at least appreciate what the cloud can do for them, then Microsoft and Google and others will have an easier time talking about their products. Before the iPhone came out, people couldn't see why and didn't want a "smartphone". Now everyone wants one, whether it's an iPhone or Android (and in the next few years Microsoft).

Microsoft does have some great products in this sphere I believe, Mesh and Skydrive being two. I haven't used either, but from what I've heard they do have some great potential. If off the back of Apple's announcement they can make them look good and continue developing on them, they will be able to sell it, even if its just by saying its the same as iCloud, but made by us. Apple does have a reputation of creating beautiful, easy to use products, but they are also seen as expensive and sometimes unneccessary. Android has taken off by being an alternative - Microsoft have the potential to be that alternative to iCloud. They have the pieces and experience shows MSFT does much better when they are the underdogs (Xbox and WP).

Just my two cents.
Somehow the first thing that came to mind was the fake-drive that lets you store infinite amounts of data by recycling existing space (and discarding your oldest data):
http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html
I disagree. Web apps are ubiquitous and people know how they work. Google doesn't do keynotes to announce that Gmail autosaves to the cloud... of course it does. Everyone has that expectation of web apps.

Microsoft got a lot of criticism for Windows 7 touch capabilities for taking something designed for mouse input and adding touch on top. It wasn't designed for that. I think that's exactly what Apple is doing here with iCloud. They are taking something that was designed for local access (native applications) and are attempting to shoehorn cloud into it.

iCloud will never work as seamlessly as a web application. Consumers will not be fooled. You can't go to your friends house and edit a document stored in iCloud. You can't pull up a Word document at the library. But you can access your Facebook account. You can open a spreadsheet in Office Web Apps.

Apple is selling iCloud because they have to. Customer perception is not on their side on this one, finally. It's a very tough sell. 1) You have to commit to the complete Apple ecosystem. 2) You have to give up the ability to access your files anywhere. My guess is that most common consumers will not fully embrace iCloud. I don't expect it to be the same type of runaway success that iTunes and iPhone were. Rather it is more likely to be a moderate success: something people use when it's convenient but not something people change their habits to accommodate.
I have a normal warm/hot shower to actually wash, and then at the end I switch off the heat and have a cold shower for a minute or two. I definitely feel the better for it afterwards, although the effect wears off after half an hour or so.

The only problem is that in the summer, the `cold' water isn't actually very cold.
Sayonara Sony
Free 60-minute 'How to Build a Startup' video series
"So would you care to give some examples of what McKenna's said that will 'set the agenda of humanity for the next 500 years' and explain your reasons for thinking they'll do so?"

So it's very difficult to do this because most of the ideas he espouses aren't really his. I think his main contribution was in combining a wide range of ideas into a compelling worldview.

- His ideas about the fragility of scientific knowledge, its dubious epistemology, e.g. the importance of the anomalous.

- His ideas about the unsustainability of consumer civilization

- His ideas about the epistemological implications of DMT and psilocybin, and drugs in general

- His ideas about using drugs to discover new ideas (IIRC in this talk: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=328)

- His ideas about the singularity and teleology

- His idea about drugs have shaped human culture over the millennia, and possibly also human evolution.

- His focus on the big questions like who are we, why are we here, where are we going, etc.

- The way he was able to find elements of validity in paradigms that have long been outright discarded such as shamanism, alchemy, various spiritual traditions, etc.

It's unclear what impact McKenna will ultimately have because it's hard to predict how people will react to living in a world that's running out of material resources, a world with 100x as many academic studies as there are now, a world with unimaginable technology and suffering, etc. But based on how things seem to be going, it's really hard to see how science can remain indefinitely divorced from philosophy and the humanities, which is sort of the essence of his worldview.

It's difficult to see him ever getting credit for much because his ideas would definitely need to be cleaned up by others and reformulated before having a wider impact, and so it's unclear how he would be credited since most aren't really his ideas to begin with. But I still think a lot of the many of the things he espoused are going to be increasingly more important in the future than they are today.
I have to agree. I have a nice morning routine that starts my day off right. If I tried to add intentional pain to that routine, it would not be a good thing.

This might be something to do on the weekends, or afternoons, or something... But not my mornings.
In this series I cover: choosing a founder, picking your product or service, pricing, culture, company structure, funding, banking, accounting and cashflow. It’s over an hour of free video, so enjoy! :)
Do you think that us living in this time period would help mitigate that?

I mean back in 2000 I was too young to understand all that, but was the bubble partly due to misinformation by of the public? I feel like with all these stories about the IPO being cast in a negative light, and how connected we are now w/ information, the average person would be much more careful.

Hm.
It's called #webbubble
I think it's this guy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Ramdev
First there was Rejection Therapy and now this. I'm sure there's merit to this stuff but how many of these practices can one adopt before they transition from conqueror to masochist?
Yeah, and I have my own domain(s), but for the majority of people, they're not tech people, they just want a simple account to use. And even with a free domain, it's still not more flexible than phone numbers, it's as flexible.
I worked for a time in a Java (and some other stuff) shop, and I witnessed people spending hours and iterations on code that could easily have been substituted with some not too sophisticated pattern matching. Some of the "senior developers" seemed to find the topic totally novel.

I think things have changed somewhat in the last 5 - 7 years, but I can appreciate the parent's point.
Anonymous has no leaders.
Anonymous is not a hacker network.
It may be that some people who belong to hacker networks use Anonymous as their name, but that doesn't involve Anonymous as a whole.

The reason Anonymous is called Anonymous, what makes it different from another human group is that anyone can be part of it, anyone can claim to represent it.
Only sites that have the tracking code installed are accurate. Anything else is guessed (poorly).
I think this is a little silly because a lot of the fruits from the google-tree have already been reaped by the author.

Its not particularly hard to live google-free now, now that you know all of the places you want to go on the internet and have many good Google-alternatives.

Because you're already aware of wikipedia, and allrecipes, and reddit, and BBC news, etc, etc.

All of the fine websites you enjoy however were almost all once learned about from Google Search or else someone who used search.

Had you not had any contact with Google Search or the people who used it in the first place from 2001-2011, you'd probably still think the internet is a trite place where there's not much to learn.

And presumably if you stopped using Google Search now and there were no good search alternatives, you'd miss out on a lot of good sites that will be developed between 2011 and 2020.

Luckily for the author, search is a booming field today. It's true that Google isn't any better than the other options available today, but when you were doing most of your fledgling searching for good content sites back in (say) '02-'06, it was there and you benefited massively.

In this way I kind of think the article is essentially saying "It is easy to live without parents once you're already an adult." Trivially true, but greatly mis-understanding of the importance that his search-parents had on him.
I really dont get why OP is so scared about eliminating the presence of all google services? Some services might be bad agreed,but why ditch everything? sounds paranoid to me. Replace chrome with firefox. whats the point?
I'll be the meta-contrarian (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...) and disagree. If you believe that it's important to deliberately suffer to build character, at least do something that provides some benefit like vigorous exercise, or even rejection therapy.
Agreed, 19% seems like a huge chunk indeed for what is essentially an automated system - the only variable costs being server bandwidth and hosting costs.
Googles WebGL Camp live stream from Mountain View, California
V8 is faster than GCC
Apple Files Motion to Intervene in Lodsys Patent Lawsuits
Actually I've responded to the advice the Economist is giving in that article, which isn't objective at all. Italy needs to boost the sectors it's great in, instead of applying generic Anglo-Saxon recipes.
I wouldn't want to work for any company that'd take issue with an article similar to this one.
I've been ending my showers with cold water forever, but that's just because it's good for your hair (I have a lot of hair). I have not experienced any other appreciable benefits.
Ask HN: How do you track of multiple sales leads?
What's an efficient way of managing multiple leads? At the moment I'm working as an intern at a startup and part of my responsibility is to come up with a daily "hit list" of companies we will be cold/warm calling.

I compile this list using several other lists (e.g. existing dealers, competitor's vendors, etc.). The only problem is that at the moment we're using an excel workbook to manage this and to me, it doesn't seem very efficient because the hit list sources are in different formats and there's no easy way to output the results into an easy to read report.

Can you guys recommend any alternatives?
I have taken cold shower almost all my life. Initially because my home was not equipped with a hot shower and later as an exercise is self control when shower became available.
It may have felt better if you either adopted to it or it was not forced in the first place.
One benefit which I have experienced is that outside temperature feel less harsh once you come out of the shower.
Unfortunately when it comes to Berlusconi, the Economist has no credibility. They simply hate him.
That's the theory, but in reality there are likely members that are more influential than others. Not official leaders perhaps, but a form of leader nonetheless.
The $300 House: A Hands-On Approach to a Wicked Problem (a rebuttal to NYT)
A better way to encapsulate and componentize older binary-only software is to create VM for them. VM is so prevalent these days. It's much easier to build a VM for older software than reverse engineering the old software.
But finding a good recruiter is even harder than finding a good hacker.
"The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."

Spain probably has a pretty rigorous internet/telephony monitoring aparatus as a result of it's internal terrorism problems, but I'm curious how they were tracked down after the wifi network was located. Did the police just search all nearby properties? Is there hardware that can locate the source of individual wifi broadcasts?
Making Kiln faster with better caching
Sounds cool. Can't wait to try it.
Announcing BlogFire - new from Notifo (YC W10)
Has anyone tried a Brompton? They're popular in London. But London is quite hilly - I'm interested to know whether you need the gears or not, nad whether the extra weight makes them worthwhile.
My girlfriend's first reaction to "iCloud" was "Is Mobile Me free now?". Its indeed fascinating to watch , a branding exercise & marketing effort doing it's job with the media & the bloggers to sell an under used platform with a bad rep.
This is great man. If you could add the bottom-sticking menu bar with icons as one of the controls this would be really grand.
I believe I said was not is. I gave up on Symbian in 2007. I'd also like to pint out that in 2006 I was working with ex-Symbian employees and they seemed equally clueless about how you would go about installing software onto my device. The answer they gave involved a Java compiler and programming environment.
Is Wintel Really History?
Thanks a lot ! Fixed the typo and I will check again the images.
Motorcycles are dangerous, require adequate training, and have statistics about loss of limbs and life (even for seasoned veterans who wear appropriate clothing).

This is probably related to a) the state of the roads here and b) the vehicle size (SUVs).
Any comments/suggestions/discouragements are wildly appreciated :)
> These tests were run against a copy of the live database in a production environment.

This is pretty terrible from a security standpoint. A development environment is typically much less secure than the live environment, and for good reason. The development environment must be accessible to developers, typically both on-site and remote. All developers have access to test databases for the purpose of testing their changes. There are often many more software packages in a development environment, and development servers have a higher probability of running vulnerable services. Live environments typically have much better logging and auditing.

Every company should have a program that can be run to sanitize the live database for use in testing. I've seen too many situations where the production environment was appropriately locked down and audited, but the development environment was compromised. It's not unheard-of for a developer to lose possession of his laptop, and if it contains a copy of the live database it's no better than the site, itself, being compromised.
Agencies Don’t Like Me Very Much
Wow, these look amazing.

Given that QR codes are mainly just used as URLs, sacrificing some capacity for better graphic design and integration into an existing design seems like the right compromise.

Especially for markets where only a small subset know what a QR code is, making it visually interesting makes incorporating a QR code into a document a lot less of a sacrifice, too. And if it's really interesting, it might make end users more interested in learning what it is.
Funny, I started taking cold showers about a month ago, without having read any article about it. I guess because I was feeling unhappy for some time and I was annoyed from having so much comfort, like good food and warm water around me and not being happy, so I decided to ditch hot water. At first I used pure cold water (this was still the tale end of winter, so it would actually numb my skin) and managed to keep it up for about a week. After that my bad mood past, however I decided to keep up taking cold showers at a moderately cold temperature (still cold so you shiver and shrink but not so that it numbs your skin.

So in conclusion I'll mention my results after a month. First of all, I feel good about it, and I never intend to go back to warm indulgent water. I feel like I got rid of an unnecessary comfort, second after about two weeks I felt like going back to warm water but the power of habit had already kicked in so I stayed with cold water. Third, Like mentioned in the article, the panic response to cold water is gradually going away, and soon I'll probably notice it flow into other areas in my life.

So I think It's a quick and effective way to develop discipline and even self esteem. I would recommend this habit especially to high school kids who bear the brunt of mass marketing from large corporations selling useless products.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet are technology specific job sites. I.e. if you're looking for a Python hacker, hit the Python Job board (http://www.python.org/community/jobs/). I assume other technologies have similar things.
I really see no point to conversing in an abandoned thread like this, but i 'm outlining it here:

1) My message would be "HN, if you care, help make more visible this request for a Google Scholar API by visiting this petition that has been submitted on google issues to add Google Scholar to the API, along with BibTex and 100+ other features that are requested in the comments for the issue. I 'm very unhappy that it hasn't been implemented in 3 years, and it's not just me, it seems other people are working on research web apps, too.".

2) How is "3 years old Google issue" of interest to anyone? It's trivial metadata (and implicit in the URL)

3) Please don't misunderstand my "are you happy now" comment. It was well-intented

4) If I used your wording, people wouldn't know whether i was pointing to an open, closed, fixed, invalid or other bug. Also there would be no indication that i actually would like them to upvote the petition.

5) I believe, "We want a Google Scholar API" is the shortest way to describe the request. "Listen, Google" is meant to be a motivator

6) This must be my most-scrutinized title. And I m not even English.
Welcome to Silicon Valley (& the SF Bay Area)
I agree that the article was wrong, but...is there really never a case in which a B-tree is a useful in-memory index, rather than a storage technique?
Oh sure NOW you give us that great advice... :-)

I'm sure a lot of source does get saved. Nevertheless, if your task were to secure legacy government systems as quickly and strongly as possible, you're going to pray for a breakthrough like this. It's not practical to walk up to a PC and, even with full authorization, dig up all the source code to the software that's running on it.

Even then, some things really are more noticeable by looking at the executable and often this is the side the attacker will be looking at. If you don't have the same or better capabilities than your adversary to analyze this side of it, you're effectively blind to your backside.
Not necessarily. It could be a particularly tricky and critical piece of code that they want to ensure nobody is "auto-merging" into oblivion.

By putting a mutex on it, you are forced to re-evaluate the state when you obtain the lock. You can't sneak in a change in front of somebody else's change, requiring them to re-evaluate (or, worse, merge and hope).

If it was required for modules all over, it would be broken process. For a single module, I can understand it.
Why would I want to live "Google free"?

Compared to other companies who collect similar amounts of data, G has (as of yet) behaved quite well.

If I don't want AdWords or Analytics tracking, I can redirect their domains to 127.0.0.1 (which I do for Analytics).
Well the thing is that Fedora is the testing platform for RedHat.

Fedora is for the desktop users, it is used to test new features, and what RH finds interesting, they add it to their server oriented distro, Red Hat Linux.

So, the fact that Fedora is not server oriented is by design.
From Interviewing JK Rowling To Inspiring Millions Every Month
> I run a magazine for software developers, so my strength is in the access/contact with hackers

Okay

> as well as detecting who is a good fit for a given startup.

how do you know that? Maybe you've got something else, but your stated strength has nothing to do with startups.
Heh, I wish I had this prowess to make millions of dollars ;-)
You definitely want to get a tool designed for that purpose. you're going to find that Excel doesn't scale well at all for what you're trying to do.

Take a look at Salesforce perhaps (although it's expensive), or some other solution like SugarCRM, or one of many dozens of other tools. For example: http://alternativeto.net/software/salesforcecom/

A lot of them are painful to use, but they're less painful than Excel.

The most important things you need it to do are keep track of the customer data, keep track of contacts with them, and allow you to schedule events, like calls and emails.

As you get more sophisticated you might want to start keeping track of lead value and potential, but for now, you'll just need to get people in a system that works better for you.
I don't thing thats the case. I am inactive from past few weeks, and there is no affect on my karma.
No new particle after all: Tevatron's second detector comes up empty
I imagine a lot of work will involve simulating the execution environment. A WINE-like infrastructure might be a component of that, but I also hear about people doing this type of thing at the virtual machine level.
$120,000 per day is just short of 4 million a month, hardly anything to cry about when people are valuing your company at a billion dollars.

Yes, it is more than 1 person makes in 3-4 years, bu Twitter is not exactly a 1-man company.

And the statement about how paying $4/follower is a good ROI is ridiculous, and misleading. A follower is not someone who follows you for life. He/she can unfollow you anytime or just ignore your tweets.
I liked the idea. It would be great if there was an option to download them too. I am on slow connection and buffering is kinda of an issue.
The Creative Commons of Privacy Policies has come, 5M end users from day one
1) I think you underestimate how much good old fashioned engineering goes into Apple products. Clunky versus seamless is a major substantive benefit for the customer, and it takes a lot of engineering to get there.

2) Being good at sales also yields benefits. Customers benefit substantively when there is a big ecosystem around a solution.

The iPhone is the perfect example. The iPhone UI works because it's FLUID. The lack of lag and the responsiveness is the difference between feeling like you're operating a computer an feeling like you're manipulating something real. That took engineering. They needed a responsive touchscreen, hardware accelerated UI stack, etc, to get that effect. Did other people have capacitive touchscreens and hardware acceleration before? Who knows, what's clear is Apple was the first one to engineer a complete solution.
its cloud based. takes old and infrequently used files and moves them to a cloud drive- symlinks it back so it still works with your apps. you can pick what files are OK to move. completely automatic and secure.
Timothy Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Body, suggests cold water showers in the morning as a mechanism to rev your metabolism and burn more calories throughout the day.
I think the context is important -- and the OP is not talking about Italians as a race but Italians as a nation with certain characteristics. Read this way, it's more akin to saying, "Americans are, well, American."