skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Almost entirely supplanting XP?

Can people still buy computers capable of running XP without extensive tweaking? Last time I saw someone installing XP on a modern, post-Vista, PC the process included downloading stuff into usb drives so that the PC could use the network.

Windows 7 sells because Dell, HP and Acer sell and the machines that were in service running XP had to break some day. Normal people use whatever their computers come with and almost nobody buys boxed Windows. Vista was an exception - it was so bad people preferred using XP, even if installing it took a whole day of boots and downloads. When OEMs start to integrate 8 into their boxes you'll see 8's adoption match OEM shipments very closely. Microsoft even declared Vista was very successful based on that kind of number.

> FWIW I am typing this in Firefox on Redhat.

I don't see what effect this has on your reasoning. You won't be "more right" because you don't use Windows.
I've love to see Jeff B. work at one of these warehouses 'undercover boss'-style. Amazon is in the business of keeping prices low but the conditions described in that article sound awful.
First Look: Native Client Apps Hit Chrome Web Store
Heh, if you think rule bending is bad in Italy, you sure don't want to live in Greece. That's how it got in the mess it is today.
Schopenhauer's 38 Stratagems, or 38 Ways to Win An Argument
I think a lot of it has to do with the HN love for Apple. HN used to love Google until they became Apple's enemy #1.
Yes, sorry, I realized now my post wasn't clear. I meant "savings to live off of for six months," not "amount you [most people] would save up in six months." $10k wouldn't be a lot for a family for six months, but it'd be a start.
I'm curious, do you have numbers backing the higher profitability of their streaming business over DVD-by-mail?

I do agree that, if they wanted to get rid of their original line of business without looking like that's what they were doing, this would be the best way.
Google's (for now) Novel Approach to "Must Read" Instructions
Well that ruins my opinion of Amazon. Anyone know of a good warehouse website that ships globally at a good rate? I won't buy from a company that treats their underlings as though they were disposable.

The part of the article that got me the most is that the company has an ambulance stationed outside on call. That right there says that Amazon's management is complicit in running a warehouse that exceeds heat exhaustion tolerances, that they are aware about it and still are doing nothing to remedy the conditions inside.

They will however, turn you loose quickly enough if you pass out.
"The fact that we are now able to manufacture usable weapon parts is an important step..."

It's not clear to me if a rifle part printed from plastic at home is usable.

I wonder how the manufacturing of these thing are regulated normally: Can you have a professional place make 2-3 of these for you without telling them what it is?
No, the attack is against SSL and Man-in-the-Middle. They just make the browser send SSL requests with those cookies, and then guess the cookie (sent inside the SSL session).
Sorry to see your post downvoted. I'm guessing you, like me initially, may be having trouble reconciling "broke-ass student" with "20k in savings." I'm guessing the savings were earmarked and locked up for future tuition payments.
Regarding the first (APIs), yes, we recently launched several Google+ Platform features, such as phase one of the Google+ API last week and today's announcement of the Google+ Hangouts API. Visit http://developers.google.com/+ to get started.

Regarding the second ("open"), we're taking our usual approach, building on open protocols wherever we can, and creating them when we have to. In this case, Activity Streams and Portable Contacts, with no doubt more to come as we launch new platform features.

As far as federation goes, love it, though one step at a time of course. Let's get the product itself off the ground and stable (today's open signups is a big step toward that) and we'll see what people want to do with it as a platform.

Thanks, Joe! The feedback is always appreciated.
Yahoo blocking emails talking about Occupy Wall Street protests
Frankly speaking if you can't decide about a candidate after 3.5 days of interviewing there's probably something really badly broken about your interviewing process. Or just that its so inefficient.

I wouldn't have accepted the offer from the company, from the very outlook it looked like bureaucratic jungle where no one is capable of taking a decision/risk until they run through some 20 meetings to decide what to do. And then toss it on to some one else.

For that if this is what you make candidate run through, you are sure to get CareerCup interview questions ebook masters but not good programmers.
This letter isn't in line with Netflix's strategy. They want the Netflix brand to be completely unassociated with by-mail DVDs. Sure Qwikster is a stupid name, but in a years time we will think of it as it's own entity/brand. Netflix classic would not accomplish this.
well, some of microsoft alums seem to have become one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809544
C++ Adds to Programming - Bjarne Stroustrup
There are three types of Win8 apps: Metro, Win32/ARM, and Win32/x86. The question is whether Win32/ARM apps will be allowed.

Why does the argument that by some magic you'll be able to purchase an iPad-like Windows 8 tablet and run full blown desktop Microsoft Office keep cropping up?

Because people like Office, MS makes a lot of money from Office, and MS actually showed full-blown desktop Office running on ARM a few months ago.
You're missing the point, I think. "will.i.am" is a stage name, not an anonymous handle. Whatever you think of the validity of the rule, surely you agree that its spirit is to make sure you can always clearly associate the account with the real person it belongs to. Surely you agree that the existing name achieves that better than "William James Adams, Jr.", right?
I have been paying attention to Appcelerator for a couple years. I've looked extensively at their platform and even attempted development with it a few times.

As a counter point, I've also used Phonegap extensively.

Titanium is going to give you a native app. They provide extensive api's so you can write in javascript and reliably cross-compile to multiple platforms. There's downsides to this though, and that's where it was a tradeoff for me.

For me, Titanium didn't offer enough control for what was being offered. Once I was invested using their platform for developing a mobile app, I would have been locked in. If there was something I needed to do on my app that wasn't supported by their API, I was basically SOL (shit out of luck).

Phonegap, on the other hand, is largely html/css/js running in a WebView with an ObjC wrapper that provides access to hardware functionality. If you write your app entirely within the framework, you're limited by the performance of UIWebView. This can seriously be an issue for certain kinds of apps.

On the other hand, Phonegap worked great as a way for me to build the UI using the web technologies I know best. Since its just a framework, I have full access to all of the project files and source code, so I can add or change stuff if I need to. An app I released back in April needed to play video. There was no capability for this native to Phonegap, so I had to add the code myself. ObjC was new to me, but I was able to work through it.

Phonegap is setup to let you build to other platforms too, but you have to set up the dev environments for Android, etc, separately.

Ultimately what it comes down to is what you need, and what you are looking to do. For me, Phonegap was the better route. For others, it might be Appcelerator.
Microsoft has already shown a version of Office running on ARM natively. For lot of current Windows app written in .NET or standard Windows API, the transition should be easy so long as MS maintains the same API's across architecture. Only problem would be for old legacy software where company that maintained it is out of business, or software that heavily relies on kernel specific functionality, etc
The description of the working conditions, job availability in the region, and worker treatment reminds me of the initial few chapters of Manna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_%28novel%29). In the novel, employees are instantly replaceable cogs in a machine and are treated with complete disrespect. As there are more people than there are available jobs, any slacking at all results in employee termination. I guess the story wasn't such a fiction, after all.
must you contribute garbage?
Do you want me to meet you at the right place or on time?

You want both. It's a false dichotomy.
> Making the line 10k is guaranteed to pick people soldily 'middle class' and not just "rich" people.

Yup. If one has a hundred grand or more in fairly liquid assets, yeah, I can see the argument for having them check to make sure all the Is are dotted. (Though even there, with life-long savings, inheritance, etc, it's within reach for "normal" people.) For less than a year's middle class expenses, probably not so much.
I meant the mentioned method by which the client polls back to the API for request/transaction status.
Not true. If you look at the GINI index (which is probably the most accurate measure for high inequality) India is quite higher than all those countries. And almost every country higher than India has significant economic problems. The only exception is Hong Kong and that is because its income inequality is obviously caused by capital flight from mainland China.

The other indexes do not capture the true nature if income inequality in these modern times. Comparing the top 10% of income earners with the bottom 10% washes things out because the truly rich are a very small group. They are a mere fraction of the top 1%.
I tried melatonin a few times and experienced some very groggy mornings. I also experienced a few nights where I could not sleep after taking a 3mg tab.

For those considering it, let me suggest a very small dose (0.5-0.75 mg, or 1/4th of a tablet) and 9-10 hours to try it out. Don't pop one of these at 2am and expect to feel great the next day.
Will Muse Kill the Web Development Industry?
When Microsoft released FrontPage back in 1997 many people thought that the web design industry would suffer because all of the sudden anyone could use this software to create a pretty decent looking website without having to know HTML.Of course CSS, PHP, MySQL, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc. all changed the game for the WYSIWYG editors. If you wanted a dynamic, data driven web site you needed to hire a developer.And with everything being “Web 2.0”, static websites just lost their appeal to many.
If Hastings admitted to a mistake, it's for failing to explain what they were doing more clearly. His words: " It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do."

Am I the only one hearing a hint of condescension here?
upvote x10. The y combinator is exactly the sort of thing I would have been happy to have written on my body, had it not turned into an investor buzzword
With all due respect, that makes no sense whatsoever. You're saying you trust Google never to shut down your gmail account under any circumstances imaginable, except for the case where you get your name wrong in google+, in which case you totally don't trust them at all and would never recommend using them.

... wat? Either you trust Google or you don't. What does Google+ have to do with it (other than being the handle on which you've hung your argument)?
Card.io launches Android SDK
"This is an amazing device! What do you call this thing? A "push cart"?? I call it the Future of Transportation! This push cart will transform cities!!!"
Fair enough. I wasn't aware that you had to live in some state for 6 months.

But are you sure you can't get a Federal only vote? I guess that would put you in the same place as DC, who also don't get representatives, which is jacked.

The should let you vote in the state closest to where you live or something. Of course, that would mostly boost the coastal states, wouldn't it. :)
An URL could be nice too. Or a QRCode ;)
if you're not a fan of tattoos why should you pipe in at all with your certain-to-be-biased, most-likely-negative opinion?

Do you understand that you must appreciate the art/science of thing in order to have an opinion worth sharing? If not, perhaps you have thoughts on the aesthetics of synchronized swimwear you would be willing to disclose, just in case?

Why is the first response on these boards almost always the naysayer's? Why are nerds so uppity about shit that don't concern them?
Appbackr takes early signups for Xchange, global distribution for mobile apps
Mobile Development Marketshare Among Hacker News' Participants
PHP Developer Hiring All Levels
Do you want to help people share cat pictures (no judgement if you say yes), or do you want to come to Edmodo and change the world! Send me an email andromeda@edmodo.com
Body by Vi scam
The cost of war is always high and has always involved private industry. This didn't start with Rumsfeld.

The government has never made its own guns, bombs, planes, tanks or any other tool of the trade.

> And waste in free markets definitely is not isolated to one firm. Ask a bank.

The banks are not a free market! They were all bailed out by government. In a free market they'd all be gone.

When I say "one firm" I mean "one at a time." Instead of systemic waste like in a government-run industry.
Sliding Window Trick in Python
Hrm? Everyone I know except myself has a TV in the bedroom that they can watch from their bed.
Make sure to check out the examples
"It would be seen as a nice benefit that traditional x86 computers can ALSO run Metro apps but I don't think anyone will lament the fact that you can't run Excel on your tablet..."

Counterpoint: The next IMHO-blindingly-obvious step in computer evolution is that your tablet/cell phone becomes your desktop when plugged into a probably-USB-based dock that adds a keyboard, mouse, and real desktop monitor (or more). Tablets that can't run real OSes days are numbered.

Having a well-delineated tablet UI layer is good. We've got over a decade of proof that just smashing a conventional desktop onto a tablet doesn't work. But I would not want to massively commit to the idea that tablets will never run Excel. They will... just not in their touch-only mode.

It's all about how committed you end up to it, though; in the short term, if only Metro is on the tablet of 2012, that's OK, as long as you can pivot, potentially as soon as early 2013. (Prototypes of this ought to exist somewhere now if MS is going to pull this off.) But if you've written this requirement deep into the tech stack, you're in trouble.
while there are definitely bad employees, the major problem is the fact that the US school system no longer trains people to be leaders. That's where friction comes in between hiring someone in the early days of the start up. You have a culture clash between a person who's trying to blaze trails and a person who just wants to be along for the ride. I think there's definitely a place for both, but in the beginning you definitely have to take extra time to look for like-minded individuals.
Sad, but true. My employer has a shop floor where the heat was, in fact, brutal. I personally raised a fuss about the heat, being one of the people deputized as first aid providers and having seen a few things that worried me. Thankfully, management responded and the guys got some more swamp coolers, as well as these things you soak in cool water and put around your neck, which improved things.

So yes, especially this year with all those heat warnings, miserably hot 100+ degree work floors, mandatory overtime and constant use of temps, harsh conditions are, unfortunately, quite normal for that kind of environment.

That said, just because it's normal, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be improved. If you have to make a fuss, you should. There are a ton of people out there who simply can't afford to make waves in this economy and they're suffering for it. The people who can best afford to make waves need to if they see unsafe conditions.
My best guess as to why they are splitting the queues is due to the availability issues on the streaming side affecting customer 'morale', so to speak. i.e. when a streaming-only customer searches for a title, and then finds that it is only available on DVD, their perception of the service is diminished.

I think the end goal of this move is to kill off or sell the DVD portion of the service entirely, so by splitting the services, investors won't freak out when that eventually happens. This also is another reason for splitting the queues.
They don't accept "the name most people know you by" either unless you're special enough. Look at Skud. http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-goog...
This is awesome, but I just want to point out one thing: twitter.util and Finagle are traps. Twitter's libraries are awesome, but won't build on scala 1.9 (or even 1.8.2), yet, and it's not clear if they will anytime soon. This rules out Akka >1.0, and 1.0 is pretty old and sometimes just broken. I just spent a couple weeks rewriting a ton of code to get myself out of this hole after starting with the awesome scala-bootstrap, and I can tell you it's no fun. So, if you want to be able to use Akka, or at least keep up with other developments in the Scala world, avoid the temptation of pretty Finagle and com.twitter.util!

Also, the sbt they use in the tutorial is an old version; the community is going through a big shift to sbt 0.10 now, which is a totally different system. Very different, and often outright weird to the uninitiated, but worth learning if you're starting new projects.

This tutorial is for Scala 1.8.1, and 1.9.1 is available now and considered stable. Use it!
It wasn't undercover, but he did do this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/27/amazon...
Even if a plastic part printed at home today isn't usable, a metal part printed at home in a few years time will be.
One way to find out - I posted a comment on that blog. We'll see if we get an answer.
Here is the link to the single-page version: http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complain...
The law is pretty clear cut in the U.S. about gun manufacturing. If you want to build the lower receiver of an AR-15, go ahead, but if you plan on selling it you need either a Type 7 or Type 10 Federal Firearms License. The rest of the AR-15 is just parts. If a "professional" makes them for you, whether or not he knows what they are, he better have a license or he could be committing a felony.
How MyZeus Is Bootstrapping Music Powered Movie Recommendations
Facebook News Feed Gets Smarter— And The Ticker Makes Its Big Debut
Why Startups Fail at Social Media Strategy
How wide would that adoption be if not for bundled sales?

Competing with 'free' is only hard once the cost is broken out and made visible.

I was personally responsible for the purchase of 3 windows licenses last year, but I didn't use any of them. The Microsoft tax makes it seem as though things are better than they really are, it's only a couple of percent but it does make a difference and I think that percentage would be higher if people had to pay the full list price for their windows licenses.
The first error I noticed in 'Basics':

scala> val timesTwo = multiply(2)(_)

This should just be multiply(2). Using an underscore misses the point of a curried function. f(_)==f..
That's shades of SCO and I don't like it one bit.
since there seem to already be quite a few employees when you started I think most of the problems there was a culture clash. coupled with the fact that they did not properly educate you on how they operated. I'm not judging different cultures but there are plenty of steps a company can take to make sure new hires fit.
Free app reviews: "This should not be free"
OK, I guess I don't see such a clear distinction between the two concepts ("available, but can't afford it" and "not available").

As I tried to say above, I agree that it's a denial of reality to equate India with the U.S. along the "poor infrastructure" axis -- based on some particularly bad examples. I believe we're in agreement about that.
Or you could see it as a symptom of how much RMS has isolated himself from the world and how that hurts his campaign. Years after AJAX had become boring, RMS finally discovered that JavaScript exists and wrote a rant about how evil it is. When someone suggested that Emacs switch to Git, RMS basically said "I'm not going to read any Git documentation, someone please explain it to me". I wouldn't be surprised if he discovered the whole Honeycomb debate just in time for it to be over. The world is moving on and he's paying no attention.
Mirror at the Washington Post since original seems to be down: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/is-printin...
I posted the 24-hour results in chart form here: http://programmingzen.com/2011/09/20/mobile-development-mark...
Agreed. People need to give up the fetish with having their own little castles for us to move forward with substantive change in urban planning and housing construction.
I actually keep Atomic Browser installed on my iOS devices, and sign in with my work account there and my personal GMail account in Safari.
Deals Company Valuations Are Plummeting: Report
Even if they're separate companies, Qwikster and Netflix should license (for pay) the queue information between themselves.

That way customers will remain happy, and the Qwikster brand could be sold to someone that wanted a business that has a sustainable deal with the content providers...
http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Charles_petzol...
The article is wrong. A license isn't required to own an AR-15 except in a few states like California.
It's difficult to find any example of a free market in America. The food industry an a whole is more free than the other social services listed above.

And a government can't just make something cheaper by edict. All a subsidy does is shift the burden of cost from the consumers to the taxpayers, or more likely anyone holding a dollar because most of these government programs are funded through deficits.

To be fair, I used to advocate public works projects and argued for smarter spending of public money. I changed my mind drastically after studying a bit of basic economics.

If you're really interested in exploring these principals and have an open mind, I recommend "Economics in One Lesson."
Those water absorbing polymer beads/bands around the neck are life-saver. They cool down the body temperature slowly overtime. Last time I hiked in Grand Canyon during summer, it was 110 degree. Those water beads really help to cool down.
This whole "not confusing people" thing seems like a nifty idea, but I think we're talking about a different company.

Is there any reason to believe that Microsoft doesn't want to confuse consumers or that not confusing consumers is in any way a winning strategy for them? Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but it seems to me that not confusing customers is Apple's schtick. Microsoft does very well with a different business model that historically has included:

WinCE WinMobile PocketPC etc. even Windows Phone 7 has gone through several name variations.

Windows Vista and 7 both offered a bewildering range of SKUs.

Version naming and numbering schemes that make no sense to anybody. (Although Final Cut Pro X is an admirable attempt by Apple to compete here, Pro having been Apple's traditional replacement for 3.)

And don't forget that Microsoft's hardware partners are all past masters of incomprehensible product lines.

And can anyone figure out which Intel CPU is which without using google today?
Unfortunately, what matters is where you want to do your business, rather than where you are incorporated.

And the patent supports (like MS) are better at exporting strong IP law than other business can do to use those weak IP laws.