skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a good case for Applemif they can get the right point across. Looking back its easy to say that the design of a tablet is obvious but it really isn't.

Since the iPad came out we all have a preconceived notion of what a tablet should look like but had the iPad been designed differently as it very well could have been and it remained as successful then we'd live in an alternate universe where everything is the same including the court cases and me-too tablets except they'd all be copying a different design. Consider this:

Apple could have chosen to use a built in keyboard. They could have used more than one physical button much like Android phones instead of just the home button. They could have used a flat back instead of an convex curve. Consider the similarity in the radius of the corners too - very similar if not the same (I haven't measured though). The black frame is not obvious as a choice. It could have easily had little to no frame. The metal border just outside the frame, also not obvious.

All of this "obvious" talk seems to me like people trying to fit a square peg (the answer) into a round hole (the answer). You may be able to jam them together but it's still not e right fit. "Obvious" is always obvious after the fact. This stuff may make sense from an industrial design perspective but it doesn't mean that tablet makers were ready to actually follow those design patterns. Companies ignore convention all the time when designing products.

And I'm closing I'll leave you all with something a little less compelling. The Samsung tablet really does look an iPad clone. All tablets look somewhat similar but in the case of Samsung it's just so obvious that it looks almost exactly the same and would it be unreasonable to wonder if maybe the similarity was not for usability reasons but just to maybe confuse consumers into thinking "hey, they look exactly alike, I'll just buy the cheaper one since its basically the same thing"?
tl; dr: I think Waterfall vs. Agile religious war is wrong; it's mostly about that you can't hit a moving target without a feedback loop.

That's why I don't think the discussion should really be Waterfall vs. Agile, it should be about feedback loops in the process. There are circumstances in e.g. military or medical projects where you absolutely, positively, need to work to an approved spec with time & budget analysis, etc.; it seems to be common outside of software (I don't see much of agile-built bridges or jetplanes). There are those parts of the process that can be predicted (and have their cost estimated) relatively well - those you plan in advance (aka. waterfall). There are others, where you only have a somewhat vague and changing final goal - there your only real solution is a process with a tight feedback loop (aka. agile).

Now you can look at software process on different levels - what might look like waterfall from the high level may be in fact a collection of very agile sub-processes. Which may contain waterfally sub-levels (like, isn't a single iteration of TDD red-green-refactor cycle a bit waterfally? ;). So I think instead of thinking about "agile vs. waterfall" we should consider what feedback loops we need where, and how tight they should be.
curiosity: why is that?
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but don't forget that Britain is also a country with socialized pensions. Dying shortly after retirement might even reduce the overall financial burden on the public.

And this kind of financial view ignores that the whole purpose of doing something collectively is to support what the collective, on average, _wants_ to do. It makes no sense to apply some supposedly objective standard of how people should lead their lives.
Makes me think of culture, which tends not to make me think of your intended content. On the other hand, it's a nice name, so maybe I'd get used to it.
The End of Publishing, or the Rantings of a Manic-Depressive?
Skandanavian payment startup Klarna nabs a huge $155M round
Most of the research on coffee that I've seen is mixed-to-modestly positive for moderate amounts (1-2 cups day). Essentially: if you're having a few cups, have no problems with it, and enjoy it, no need to stop. Some people do experience sleep and stress problems.

I've found that relying on tea through the course of the day (after a morning mug of espresso) keeps my energy levels more even. Dittos knocking off the carbs -- much more even energy levels, and no post-lunch slump.
Yeah, the lenovo finish is very nice.
Thank you!

Algorithmically. The game actually came out of a research project into generating and automatically ranking the difficulty of puzzle games.

I have a long term plan to write a new game, with different puzzle games in it, using the same technique. The main slowness is a) Playing around with HTML5 and b) Figuring out how to make money off it (as with a webapp, you can actually lose a lot of money with hosting and servers, instead of the $100/year cap from Apple!)
Also, Lenovo has some good deals on their site. You should check it out.
Say what you will about large corporations but at the very least they can get this right. I'm working for a 4,000+ company now and we take these steps very seriously during our Engineering design. Also part of the job is working with vendors (Oracle, HP, others) who send people on sight from around the world to work with us (the client) and properly interview for the right knowledge.

Call me bias, but a lot of smaller companies overlook tried and tested standards. Proper requirement elicitation was documented in IEEE Computer Society SWEBOK prior to 2004 and even that is a summary of important knowledge to Software Engineering profession. Why is it that when a new company comes along with a truly innovative concept they feel they can innovate the rest of the process as well?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896889
True, there are limits - but that doesn't mean it's flawed.
1. DD also provides protection. Admittedly not at the same level, but the banks do guarantee the scheme against misuse.
2. Very true - but if only DD is offered as an ongoing payment mechanism then many people will use it.
3. The UK is a perfectly valid market to target - and hosted DD provision is an excellent innovation to offer.
"The market" will only sort this out properly if it is efficient. There's too much uncertainty for that to be the case. Put another way, how is a company supposed to come up with an accurate expected value of suing/defending? There are so many unknown factors that have significant impact on the outcome.

Eventually, once a lot of those unknowns become accurately estimable, then yes the market can solve these problems. But there's a giant cost associated with waiting around for that.
Actually, smokers cost less to the state, since their lives are shortened:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-04-08-fda-tobacco-c...
It's a linguistic thing, I think.

Not disagreeing that it is an area where Apple should have behaved better, but

The 'but' implies "Not disagreeing, but not totally agreeing either". It might have been better to not mention Apple at all:

"It's interesting to note that Rambus persued this tactic in an even worse way..."
Perhaps not.

But they're probably running a computer model of the jet (and its systems) under various simulated scenarios.

They're also probably building some full-scale mock-ups to test in wind tunnels.

And they also have test pilots to fly things which sometimes never make it into wide scale production.

So, I'd argue that there is some iteration going on there.
The letter of the law is one thing, being a dick is another. It isnt like apple just found these patents under a couch cushion, they knew they had them. They also knew that the w3c and the browser vendors were working on this. They let everybody work on the standard while they planned to throw their legal team at it at the last minute. It doesn't matter what the rules are, apple is acting maliciously here.
Try Google presentations. No login required.
"going to your manager and asking to fire up a linux VM in a Microsoft shop will probably get you reprimanded (or laughed at)"

Whoa whoa whoa. It's narrow minded to not dance around the narrow mindedness of others?

There is certainly a problem that needs solving here, but it's not Redis on windows.
I don't understand why the W3C even allows this.

When companies submit any documentation whatsoever as part of, say, an the ITU H.264 standardization process, they are required to sign off on a form that states whether they have patent claims on that documentation. If they do, they declare that they are willing to license it under the terms required for that specification -- no surprises.

This doesn't eliminate the possibility of later surprise patents, but it does mean that it's unlikely any can come from anyone involved, because to even be involved in the process, you have to declare legally that this won't happen.

Why does the W3C not do this? If a W3C standard requires that all patents involved be licensed in a particular royalty-free manner, shouldn't even proposing an idea to the W3C require a declaration that one has no patents on said idea, or that will license ones' patent in such a manner?
Best Selling PRS Santana Electric Guitar Yellow
Price: $390.86. Save $20 off Thanksgiving Day Sale. Free Shipping Worldwide. I can't even read notes. But I can teach someone how to make a guitar smoke. Ace Frehley
A nice idea. Some folks may be nervous about expressing ideas without an NDA involved, but do we want their ideas anyway? :-)

The design looked nice, but it was not intuitively obvious how to get back from an idea to the main screen.
What's wrong with Notepad++? Notepad++ is the Windows equivalent of Coda or TextMate, it's one of the first things I install every time I'm on a Windows machine.

I can get my Notepad++ themes off my source-control and have the exact same look/feel on whatever machine I am, and it has FTP/SFTP, Subversion, and more recently, Git plugins available too.

Oh I probably should say that I don't disagree that the survey is very biased (just look at the sample size), but Notepad++ is one of the only few things on that list I'm not shocked to see.
> this was well known 10 years ago.

This was well known 40 years ago:

The most deadly thing in software is the concept, which almost universally seems to be followed, that you are going to specify what you are going to do, and then do it. And that is where most of our troubles come from. The projects that are called successful, have met their specifications. But those specifications were based upon the designers’ ignorance before they started the job.

--Douglas Ross, 1968 (http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PD..., p. 32)
Tech.li TV: First Look at the New Twitter Design
there is actually a significant difference and that is in America there is at least a opportunity, if not minor, for the people to have a say and not allow this law to pass. There are no such opportunities in China.
No, they are very welcome. I learnt an awful lot about how to make a very good 'core' game engine, and how important everything else is (in some ways, unfortunately, more important).

One day I'll hopefully manage to make a new game, with both parts done well.
I think most major colleges are still teaching C++ as the main programming language. Sure, there are classes in Python or Ruby on occasion, but I think most are still in C++.
I know a lot of schools teach Java, but that's a lot more similar to C++ than it is to something like Python.
News is sort of a broken industry :)
Big misalignment of incentives - everything is about readership and generating traffic. I know plenty of people that write, and very few of them are knowledgable on the subject matter they write about (and they know it). It's just an industry like any other, with a product and a customer.

Besides, my business is 'whatever I want it to be.' The scary thing here is, now that it's been reported, it can now be cited as 'fact'
Chrome sandboxing makes it the most secure browser, vendor study claims
Sounds like you need a day off to play video games.
I think this is your answer: https://openshift.redhat.com/app/flex

Provide your EC2 info or -

Take advantage of Red Hat's free trial offer. The free trial includes 30 days or 30 hours (whichever comes first) of free cloud resources from Amazon EC2.

The free trial is governed by the terms and conditions agreed to during the registration process for OpenShift.

Please Remember:

OpenShift is in developer preview with no service level agreements.

* OpenShift should not be used for production purposes.

* At Red Hat's discretion, it may decommission the resources it granted as part of the free trial without notification, explanation, or backup.

* Users of OpenShift Flex are responsible for making backups of all their data

* After the expiration of the free trial, the resources and data on them will be deleted

* To maximize the time of your free trial we recommend that you stop your cluster when not utilizing it
This part is true for my site as well:

> What I found was that a number of customers filled
> in our order form, went off to Paypal or Google
> Checkout, but never completed the order.

On my site, I've made all the numbers public. Over the last 6 months, roughly 25% of people start questions, but then don't pay.

Compare these 2 charts. The first shows the number of paid questions per week:

http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyQuestionsPerWeek

and this shows the questions that people started but then never paid for:

http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyUnpaidQuestionsPerW...

I'm guessing that the numbers would improve if we weren't using PayPal, so next week I'm planning to try to use Stripe.

However, I am sad to say, for making payments I am still stuck with PayPal for awhile, as I can not see anything else that is so easy. On any given day my website gets something like $70 and pays out something like $50. Right now I've a cron job that runs once a night and which pays everyone who is owed money from my PayPal account. But the payments are usually small. On a normal night, at 3 AM EST, my PayPal account makes payments that might look like this:

$24

$14

$12

$9

$7

$7

$5

$4

$4

$3

$3

$3

$2

$2

$2

$2

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

$1

I use the PayPal MassPay API. I've looked into other services for sending payments, such as Payoneer, but none have such wide acceptance as PayPal.

Any suggestions for sending automated payments, other than PayPal?
Odd that half the screens have couch-style content and half have desktop-style content.
that's revenues but profit it's around 429K per employee which is still ridiculously high.
All these cases you describe are stand alone systems and could equally well be running Linux, or running it in a virtual machine.

I should have asked "inside devices running windows , or as a component in 'end-user' business software running windows " I thought that was implied given the context.

Specifically about printers - they're not that fast that sqlite or postgres can't deal with them. Really. redis is for the 50MB/sec pushing-things-around speed. Fastest printers are at the 10MB/sec, which MSSQL, PosgreSQL and SQLite handle perfectly well. Also, redis is about lots (hundreds of millions) of small items. printers are about few (thousands) of large items.

> Computer systems that control factory processes, such as SCADA and MES systems, often have to deal with large amounts of data coming in from many different machines. Most vendors therefore wrote what they call a "real-time database", even though it is not really real-time, just fast. Redis would be a great substitute for such a database.

They should pay for a "real" in memory databsae if they can pay for windows. TimesTen, Sybase IQ, Kx. Yes virginia, there are consequences to using the proprietary eco-system.

> Imagine a team of 10 sysadmins for a 3000 person company all highly skilled in administering Windows systems. Moving such people to Linux "just" to administer a Redis installation is impractical, and the company will rather disregard Redis for other options.

You're spending $1M/year in sysadmin salary alone here - probably $1M/year more on hardware and other licenses. Shell out $50K for TimesTen and be done with it. Or pay someone (possibly even antirez) who'll produce a windows port. If it's not worth $50K to this company, it's not worth even a single minute of antirez' time.
And Redis relies on POSIX semantics, which is... er... core POSIX?

Microsoft does have a third option, you know. One many of us would love to see happen: real, first-class POSIX support in Windows.
Ironically, Ford fought tooth and nail against an overly generic patent for automobile (similar to a design patent because the guy who owns it is a lawyer and never built an actual model before getting the patent) and won.

http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
Long ago (and probably more recently as well) there was a funny little info-graphic regarding which mobile companies were suing which. Has anyone stumbled upon a similar summary of knowledge regarding who is banned from selling where?

I honestly don't know who started this whole thing and I don't want to point fingers but it feels as though someone thought it was a good idea to try and block the sales of some product and opened a whole can of shitstorm.
Amazon Price Check app draws protests from some retailers
You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away?

As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom:

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular technology. To most people, applying pinch to zoom on a capacitive screen verses some other type of screen is pretty obvious, it works in any situation where you have multiple touch points.

None of this stopped Apple from patenting it. It didn't stop the patent system from granting the patent. And perhaps worst of all, it doesn't stop Apple from using this patent to claim that they did all sorts of work and pioneered multitouch with gestures like pinch to zoom.

The problem many of have with Apple stems from exactly this type of situation. While this is one of the most talked about, I have no doubt that you can find many other examples of Apple enforcing trivial patents granted in a narrow band, or in some caes like the Apple vs Samsung, not so narrow.

You don't typically see people complaining about patents on Latent Semantic Indexing, Page Rank, or other complex algorithms that are truly non-obvious. If our society truly believes that minor tweaks on existing ideas are grand innovations worthy of patent protection, that's a very sad statement on the human condition.
Missed this first time I commented:

> Submitting code upstream to Redis is completely independent of their patent decisions regarding Android. I'm not a fan of their overall stance with respect to FOSS/Linux/Android, and they may be earning the snark there, but not in this case.

Wrong. They are both cleared by the same legal department, guided by the same company vision. They are not being a useful member of the community. They're trying to give people less reason to leave Windows. Pure self interest, completely in line with everything else they do.
I think a lot of the newer "social" free apps fall into this category, like that Oink menu item review thing. It's polished, a good app, and theoretically useful, but I wouldn't be surprised if it just dies off.
Spolsky's interview technique here is flawless
He's wrong. If everyone were a generalist, we'd achieve very little as a species.
I think it's free. Their FAQ [1] says:

"OpenShift, is a portfolio of free, portable cloud services for deploying and managing applications in the cloud."

[1] https://www.redhat.com/openshift/faq
Hilarious.

But all jokes aside, have you ever tried to explain to a self-described 'technical-enough-to-be-dangerous' corporate middle manager what an iterative and incremental process is?
The parent of the post I responded to argued that Linux has not "won the software deployment war". I happen to agree with that and I believe that throwing out a few examples of technology companies that do deploy their software on Linux is not a convincing argument.

The way my GP alleged that no big companies use Windows as a platform came off as snarky and represents what I think is a skewed, SV/web-startup centric point of view.
EPUB – format for ebooks
I was thinking that this was a particularly clever idea--given that Amazon seems to very good at "pricing arbitrage", as someone smarter than I said.

Some of the stated objections are that Amazon, who doesn't always collect sales tax, is taking business from local stores.
It isnt like apple just found these patents under a couch cushion, they knew they had them.

You're assuming the people working with the W3C even knew that Apple had these patents. Apple is a big corporation. The people that are working with the W3C probably didn't even look for the patents themselves, it was probably the legal department that finally said, "Oh here's some that might apply."
> If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine.

Which is why it is such a pity that they are still putting so much valuable work into fighting Elisp instead of having a full fledged CL with a native compiler under the hood. The FSF even has two own, GPL'ed CL implementations, CLISP and GCL, but because of RMS' hatred of CL, let them bitrot and never really cared to use them for anything.
One man, one company, one device in Germany?

Remember those Vic Gundotra shot's at Google I/O ?
"Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice.”
“Not The Future We Want.”

Now, when Motorola (Google) succesfully banned iOS in Germany, someone should ask Vic, what is he gonna do about it. This IS the future they DID NOT wanted.