skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The value proposition for SAP is consistency in business processes and data accuracy. It views the employee using the transaction code as a position in the company (as in just a cog in the data supply chain) and not a person.

This view is helpful when you want to guarantee business processes are followed correctly in a billion dollar plus company, and this is why this software is sold to CFO's and not IT Departments and End users. This view though has drawbacks when it comes to HR and you expect employees and managers to perform "softer" business processes that are not as rigid. I have implemented SAP ESS/MSS and my experience the culture of the HR staff if vastly different than that of finance and that "cog in the system" isn't working well for them and they need more tools that are "usable" for normal people. That is where I see the latest purchases of Sybase, Business Objects and now SuccessFactors coming. SAP now needs to target their software for "normal people" now that they are moving past simply providing line items to be rolled up on the general ledger

Furthermore, As for your "non cookie cutter" example, the business processes of Purchasing, General Ledger Sales are so similar that most companies that cook up custom business processes because they are designing in the dark and don't have access to information that would tell them a better way of doing it. This is where SAP comes in. If your competitive advantage is not how you execute a Purchase Order or how you move t-shirts from the distribution center to the store, why not just do it how everyone else is doing it?
Yes, you could bias the coin in many ways. But the author chose an inexpensive method available to readers without experience in metallurgy.
Lots of the comments here are missing the point. In my experience at enormous companies (that have had e-mail policies, in varying degrees, like this one), they have zero to do with productivity and have everything to do with the various laws, rules, and regulations surrounding data retention of e-mail.

To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to much less legal liability.
You are assuming that competition will only come from smaller entities. My comment was simplistic because each scenario is different and I was speaking in the general case. Standard Oil had lost a lot of market share by the time it was broken up. AT&T existed as monopoly because government had heavily regulated the telecommunications industry.
Becoming the #3 browser doesn't make Firefox anywhere near "doomed". It's just back where it was a few years ago, as far as market share is concerned. The desktop and laptop userbase isn't going to disappear anytime soon, either.

I don't know much about the search engine partnership issue, but it seems that the author suggested his answer to that. No search service can afford to ignore a browser with over 20% market share.
Sounds like that's a problem that could be fixed quite simply. Find out why HR is sending out so much stuff, and if there's a better way to do it or a way to eliminate it altogether. A short, once-a-day announcements e-mail should suffice, no?
Fat Burning Furnace
It actually does seem pretty likely that someone else--Yahoo, Microsoft, who knows--and use Firefox to their advantage in some way. But yeah, I don't see Google renewing the deal.
At least on Android Firefox works really well, and thanks to the intent system can replace the default browser regardless of where in the system you open a link.

This doesn't mean we wouldn't be in the old IE monopoly of "nobody downloads browsers"
Because neither Apple or Google have a monopoly on the browser market anywhere near what Microsoft had. Also, Microsoft was sued for actively thwarting competition[1] in order to maintain it's position.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
Android and the iPhone don't have a monopoly on mobile phones. So long as you aren't a monopoly, you are free to restrict the software on your phone as much as you'd like.

Plus, you can have a different browser on both the iPhone and android.
A huge part of the ERP business model is on-premises install/config. By leaving implementation to others, traditional ERP vendors avoid the risk of actually getting it to work properly. They're accustomed to selling a box of tools and pointing you to an army of consultants who will gladly take a shot at making it work. By the time you have anything to test, SAP has long since cashed your license check and booked their revenue.
I think the issue here is that Mozilla can't afford to still exist without that 100 million from Google a year. But yeah, I don't see why someone else wouldn't come in and swoop on that.
I actually tried including an analytic solution as well, but it took up a lot of space and seemed like clutter. I figured most people would prefer the graphical solutions anyways.

Thanks for the link, I should include that inside the post somewhere. EDIT: Done.
Firefox isn't doomed. Not only is it still a good web browser that many (myself included) continue to use daily, inertia will keep it installed on millions of PCs.

As far as I know, Mozilla and Google maintain good relations. Even if the deal that provides money from Google to Mozilla isn't renewed, I doubt they will entirely disentangle themselves from each other.
Let's hope they are collaborating with some real researches to measure the impact of this. It's definitely a super interesting and plausible experiment.

I have a love/hate relationship with email. It's definitely good in theory, but in reality there are hundreds of problems with it.

One example: I get hundreds of CC'd emails a day ( I'm CEO ) and people assume that I read them and memorize them.
Sure, it's a super low overhead way for other people to update me on all sorts of progress. However, I don't need that kind of visibility. I train people to make decisions autonomously and give me weekly updates. I can do that because I'm everyone's boss and I'm still drowning under the flood of well meaning CCs. I'm sure it's worse for most.
"Is Firefox Doomed!? FIND OUT MORE AT 10!"
Throwaway account. My company created an analytics product around the ability to track which sites your visitors have visited. It used a different and (at the time) more reliable technique.

About a year after the product launch we were contacted by a powerful washington based lobby group and they wanted to chat. They felt it violated a site visitor's "reasonable expectation of privacy". I agreed. So we pulled the feature and dodged a bullet as this "browser bug" hit the mainstream press a few months later. The feature wasn't a major part of our product's value prop, few of our customers used it and none missed it.

So if you're thinking about basing a startup on this, don't. You will get a call very quickly from organizations much larger than you are asking awkward questions.
I work for a software company that is owned by a parent company from Canada (but the company I work for is in the US), I can say this doesn't surprise me, management from Canada seems to place a low priority on spending to keep things modern
Please, please, can an artist mock up a "Presenting the new Samsung Galaxy X" graphic post haste? Just the mental picture of the proposed redesign was snort-out-loud funny. Sharp corners, front surfaces with substantial adornment, and an off-center, cluttered appearance with wide edges, hoo boy.
Please let me know if there's you think there is something that the article misses.
Also, based on how big of a bending angle you actually need to bias the coin, I doubt anything you could do would bias the coin without being very noticeable.
I put it to you that you're a shill.
Google benefits from being the default search engine in Firefox. They wouldn't pay $100 million per year to Mozilla if there wasn't some reasonable return on that investment. I imagine that the search traffic generated by Firefox will remain valuable to Google until FF's market share drops into the single digits.

The article implies that Google is charitably allowing Firefox to exist ("Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as Firefox needs Google."). I'd like to the think the Google-Mozilla relationship is mutually beneficial.

Firefox may become a viable alternative to Android's built-in browser once the native UI version is complete.
Show HN: Tag and discover GitHub projects.
Http://narly.us

Just saw 'repos.io' on the front page.

Narly.us is solving a similar problem so thought I'd share it here. What do you think? Useful or not? Features I need?

The main difference is Narly.us is trying to be a public place for the community to organize and qualify projects via tagging while repos.io seems to be more account based (organize your personal repos)
Is it just me or is Garry's Mod becoming reality?
Forgive my ignorance, but if a company exists in an industry with mandated data retention/logging, wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.

Maybe the laws in question are so narrowly crafted that they apply only to email, I don’t know. Seems like a strange justification for the switch though.
How is it possible to loose $1000 of stock? I was wondering because I am a bit concerned about my own stocks that I invested.
Maybe you could use it to only show those social sharing widgets that are for services the visitor actually uses. Though I guess WebIntents will eventually be a better way to handle that.
First of all, at this moment Codecademy only teaches Javascript, so you don't need any Ruby knowledge.
Also, I think it has several "Start Programming" lessons for starters... It should be a good starting point.
http://comix.sourceforge.net/
The issue with IE came from the notion that Microsoft already had a monopoly on operating systems and was using that monopoly as unfair leverage in the "browser market". (This made more sense at the time than it does today, as now the idea that a desktop OS would ship without any browser seems silly).

As long as Android and iOS both remain strong competitors, neither can really be seen as a smartphone (or tablet) monopoly. This is part of the reason I think Apple going "thermonuclear" on Android is counterproductive for them -- if they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and Android disappeared tomorrow, Apple would essentially be assured of having the government (not just the US, but perhaps even more so in Europe) come in and force them to open up iOS far more than they would be comfortable doing.
One of SF products is written in Ruby on Rails. Interesting. Seems like an on-going trend that Big Co. are using Rails for their newer projects (I believe BusinessObjects were looking for a few Ruby on Rails talent as well not too long ago for their new products).

https://performancemanager4.successfactors.com/career?career...
Used-Snowblower Ad Takes Canada by Storm
Four Golden Lessons from Steven Weinberg
Almost all startups, small companies, and even large companies that I've worked at have had some level of software piracy in their organization. Of course, I could just be unlucky in where I've worked, but it's always been rationalized away in some capacity ("once we start making money, we'll buy legitimate licenses").
ruby on rails has sitemesh as its layout system. i agree, it is a great pattern for building web apps.
Very interesting comment. Remember Groupwise or Lotus Notes - the whole groupware craze? This is a great argument for a tightly controlled proprietary internal communications system and I wonder if we might see a resurrection of the groupware fad.
Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as Firefox needs Google

Even if true, that doesn't mean Google doesn't need Firefox.
And phantom.js
"rooting for the person that goes for it" is an example prime of a subjective statement. Do you not think that patent trolls perceive themselves as "going for it"?
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It's actually hard - and perhaps impossible - to bias a coin by weighting one face. It's not a very well studied area, but according to what info I can find[1], as general rule, you should assume that if some shady stranger in a bar is offering to bet money on the outcome of a coin flip, the coin is going to be perfectly fair. (Also, you can always work around a possibly biased coin by instead flipping the coin twice, and repeating the process until you get HT or TH, and then using the first element of the pair as the result.)

On the other hand, it is well established that the process of flipping a coin is biased, and a skilled coin flipper can produce whichever result he wants with a probability approaching unity. And there's NO way to work around that bias. The lesson here is probably "don't wager money on the outcome of coin flips".

[1]: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~nolan/Papers/dice.pdf
At the time, there was pretty much only one category of personal computing device and Microsoft's OS ran on nearly every one sold. Legally, they were considered to have a monopoly in the consumer OS market and to be abusing this monopoly to stifle competition in the web browser market.

Now we have a variety of devices and platforms and I think it's fair to say that there is no comparable conglomeration of power in the industry. Not yet, anyway.
Instant messaging is NOT a good substitute for email, because it requires that everyone be simultaneously available over an always-on Internet connection. Email in contrast enables asynchronous communication over unreliable Internet connections.

Wiki-style or Facebook-style application might SEEM better alternatives to email, but as soon as most people in the company start using these applications instead of email, guess what? All those superfluous, time-wasting messages that were clogging up the email system will start clogging up the new applications. It's human nature.

A much better approach IMO would be to transition away from old-fashioned corporate email applications like OutLook/Exchange to newer ones (like Gmail) that make employees more productive/efficient.
this abstraction layer and the whole focus on "usability" appears to be more of a hindrance that complicates access to the actually useful parts of the library (the high-speed crypto).

If you're not using the abstraction layer, the high-speed crypto bits you mention aren't useful anyway. The high speed crypto is djb's favourite primitives -- curve25519, salsa20, and poly1305 -- which is fine if you're only ever going to talk to other people using this library but makes it utterly useless otherwise since nobody else ever uses those primitives.
It said I have not visited any of them, except google (there it just says "whoops", I'm not sure if that is a hit or not).
Right, but those applications will be for things like online advertising, which is already tracking your visits and/or just assuming you use the popular sites anyway. Can this be used to violate privacy in a meaningful manner if it misses 50% or more of the time? You'd have complete plausible deniability if you were pinned to have accessed some site you don't want people to know you accessed. It can't be used as evidence in anything. What would the threat look like?
How do I enable timeline for my profile?

This is frustrating because I'm actually a facebook developer who would actually like to look at ways of incorporating this into my project.

I know there was a workaround for a while that involved signing up as a dev to get in on the preview.

le sigh
Science Exchange, Grubwith.us, MinoMonsters, Hype, Mailgun, InboxQ, Earbits - yeah...all group buying sites...nothing original here. ;)
Google's developing Chrome as part of their 'headless' browser, which now powers their crawler. If I had to guess, they'll keep Firefox around as a partner to cover all their bets. Between that and Chrome, they have a nice chunk of market share to compete against Internet Elephant.
The issue was strictly about looks, and Samsung showed prior art. It is not required to have created said art yourself.

As for the picture with the pre-iPad tablets, I bet some of them are made for special use cases, like rough environments.
And that is why it's tolerated to a certain threshold. Thankfully (for us and him) we're still below the threshold. But if more people start selling candy on the subway you can bet you'd be happy they did something about it. And this dude would be making significantly less money.
The problem occurs when you have dozens of departments each wanting to make their short once-a-day announcement ;)
Extremely wrong on Chrome. The first time I ran it, it said I had not visited any of them. Google and HN were definitely browsed today.

Ran it again, ALL of them appeared visited. Even sites like abebooks, which I have not visited at all.
What does Mozilla do with their cash?
It's not "city" stuff, but Muir Woods is in the area and is wonderful.

http://www.nps.gov/muwo/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor#Von_Neuman...
This guy is selling through pure hustle. I find it hard to criticize him when he's working his ass off, every day, to earn a buck for his family. He's not mugging anyone. He's not stealing. He's not, in fact, doing any harm at all.

I bet most of the people bitching on here would complain even more if this were a story about how he's collecting welfare.
No, it's clearly not doomed.

Google wants people to use their services, and to use browsers that are up to scratch to do so. They also want to influence web standards so that they can build better products. This is why they built Chrome.

Firefox helps them to achieve these goals by being another alternative to IE, and having similar views about evolving web standards.
That's because the second time you ran it, all the images were in your cache from the first time you ran it. That's the expected result.
Codayus, if you notice this, you appear to be hellbanned (all of your comments for the past 10 days are dead, including the one in this thread). I looked over your comment history and I can't understand why this would be, so I'm alerting you in case you want to ask PG for a reprieve.
Did they not come up with a new and interesting way to do search? I think you're massively confused about the beginnings of google.
It got all of them right for me (Chrome, Windows XP) except for twitter. I got a "whoops" for google multiple times.
I meant that a searchable Facebook style interface for archiving corporate communications isn't impossible, and already exists from at least one vendor. Not that a company should outsource their communication to Facebook.
So, if you see nothing, there could be a polar bear RIGHT THERE.
I think they do. But, I also think you're probably smart enough to know what I meant.
How can I possibly comment on it if I can't get any factual information? Are you saying witches don't exist? We've all seen them and you look like one.
That's 15M _paying_ users right there.

37Signals says "millions" of users, active, inactive, paying, and free. Numbers probably way lower than that (10% of paying users?)
rmygod!
It's telling me no on HTC / Orange / UK.
It said "not visited" for EVERYTHING, except google which says "whoops". I have visited nearly all of them in the last 2 months.

But don't despair, I have one of the most hostile browser settings. I have RequestPolicy, NoScript,and Flashblock.
I would be surprised if Google didn't renew their contract. There are still a TON of Firefox users out there, and I'm sure they would love to market to them.

It's the same reason they still make iOS apps. They don't care about what software you use, just that you're searching with Google.
Mozilla is a non-profit foundation. It isn't out to be the best at everything in every market, it's out to encourage competition and provide a solid FOSS solution to a difficult problem. As far as they're concerned, they've already won.
Ad retargeting without going through one of the high-reach ad networks. Or any product site instantly knowing which competitors you've researched, and tailoring their pricing to that.
Firefox is doomed because its lost its developer foot hold, anecdotally most devs I know refer to it as a joke and use Chrome instead. Its a browser that relies on recommendation to exist, and it no longer is getting recommendation.

On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better, historical problems have never been addressed, version fragmentation is occurring, on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.

The UI is polarising (its the major complaint I actually here next to 'laggy behavior'), the options to change it rely on 3rd party modules which are often bugging and not supported between versions. It's never nailed OSX, it just doesn't 'feel' the same as the rest of the operating system and is slightly jarring at times.

Personally if you take a base install of Opera 11 it is exactly how I want FF to be set up, everything works smoothly, fast, and 'clicky'. I'd recommend any FF user to try the new version of Opera for a few days, then go back to FF and see just how different it feels even though they are aesthetically quite similar.
I see your point, but I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Chrome is too closely linked to Google, so Firefox will always be a good alternative for people who care about privacy.
Watch Miguel Cotto vs Antonio Margarito Live stream Boxing
Damn right. Don't handout cookies to strangers unless you're a girl scout.
Why is it considered a thoughtful argument that he is at least not committing worse criminal acts?
It's entirely possible that Google won't renew the deal, which would put about $100 million of Firefox's revenue at stake.

It would make no sense for Google to renew this agreement... if Mozilla suddenly changed Firefox's default SE that would not go over well with the users. It seems much more likely that they would form a new deal with less revenue going to Mozilla.

Of course that doesn't mean Firefox is done. That is highly dependent on Mozilla's innovation in the next few years.
Nice way to dodge the question again. First time you said it was because it conflates two issues, second time you said it was because I asked you already.

I'll ask you one last time. Do you think it's decent behaviour to turn down the purchase of a print that you like, and tell the artist that instead you are going to take a photo and make your own copy for free?
Same results here, and I'm not running any of the things you mentioned; also been to many of those sites, within the past few days in many cases. I'm basically on stock Chrome (though I do have Adblock).
Maybe a cramdown after recapitalization?
I hope not. Currently nothing beats Firefox with Pentadactyl, Adblock Plus, Firebug, Tabmix plus combination. For real VIM geeks this is an insanely fast way to navigate the web and do online research.
In my case, the ones it got wrong were the images that returned a 304 (not changed) header since they returned significantly faster than fetching the full image.
Life is rewarding greed... What's new?
I do but I don't email it to myself, just leave in the drafts.
I am sure someone else would pick up the slack.
Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis
A smart CEO should take this into account, and actively work to ensure a healthy culture.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Non-profits are interested in "providing a solution to a difficult problem", but they are also interested in self preservation.