skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fine, they are "undead" products. I reiterate that the consumer is aware of them as failed experiments, not as "subtle redirections forming the core of a new flagship product".

I don't know how many google searches you want me to provide you with. Here is the top result for [Microsoft brand]. Admittedly it is from 2010. However, it is not an isolated example.

"Microsoft is a dying consumer brand"

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/27/technology/microsoft_pdc/ind...

Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past.

Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

Here's something from a few days ago reinforcing my position.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsofts-branding-crisi...
All working, thanks. You guys should think about asking students on campuses to post flyers for you on Beagle (or some other promotion). Verifications could be sent by photo. This could be a cheap way to seed some tasks and get people to use the service.
Every :60 in Social Media, Millions of People Connect
France’s Book Grab: Worse Than Google Books
I'm a cofounder, my name is Julian. I definitely understand your point and it has been a topic of debate with us for quite some time. However, we think that college campuses are perfect for something like this because of the pre-existing communities, and the security (albeit mild) that they provide. There are obviously a lot of students scrounging for cash, but we think that with professors (anyone with a .edu email) there will be a good amount of people posting as well. Beagle is also ideal for quick and easy tasks, so they probably won't be very expensive.
So where's the appeals court opinion sanctioning this type of thing? Without something like that, I don't see much precedential value.
Woohoo! Vancouver represents!

Thank you for your invitation Colin, questions coming up as soon as I have time to write them!
> It is ancient. Someone who is still using XP has a computer that's more than five years old and has never upgraded.

Or they work for a corporation who can't upgrade to a decent OS because they invested heavily in IE6-only web applications which their business runs on.
But that is already an issue - whether or not you have a .com domain name. The domain name is just an asset and the government routinely seizes assets when filing criminal charges.
Windows 8: highlighting the stupidity of Hulu and Spotify’s business models
Eye-opening WordPress CMS Usage Stats
French governmental organizations are typically less dysfunctional than American ones

Sorry, the research I've seen has shown the American government to be marginally more effective [1] and marginally less venal [2] at a much lower relative cost [3] than the French government. Quangos are usually in a class of their own when it comes to derision for public sector inefficiency [4].

[1] http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/worldmap.asp (2010 Government Effectiveness)

[2] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Government_...

[4] http://www.economist.com/node/18867672
OK, and I don't expect that. XP is obsolete, and if people want new software they can upgrade. If they don't, well, XP appears to be working just fine for those folks, doesn't it? This is how we move forward.
Tests that fail one day every four years
Running Mathematica scripts automatically from the command-line is major pain. That and just writing the benchmark code. A contribution would be most welcomed.
Smart, thanks!
I originally built node-monitor (https://github.com/franklovecchio/node-monitor/tree/v0.5) to monitor multiple servers; I was trying to emulate Splunk by sending all data from an environment to a couple servers, which then pushed out to websockets (live log viewing) + POSTed to CloudWatch. Ended up throwing out the socket piece because it was a pain in the ass to manage.

On a side note, you can scale what would be single-instance architecture with something like messenger (think an MQtt.js broker).
Movie studios team with Sandisk and Western Digital for anti-piracy initiative
I think MSFT is worried about a future where IT workers bring in their personal tablets for consumption work - at some point they're going to become "good enough" for their creation work and replace the desktop PC (similar words were probably said about the mainframe). If they play a reactive role it may be too late.
sane error messages are worth the switch alone.
But is seen as a lesser domain by Google if SEO tales are true.
My, what an intuitive interface! Just add a new "mailto" content-type and link it to gmail.

Theres so much wrong with this on so many levels. "mailto" isn't a freaking Content-Type, and this is not the right way to design interfaces.
Tmux - Productive Mouse Free Development
>$170 for every one thousand referrals

well according to google (and google doesn't lie) https://www.google.com/search?q=%24+170+%2F+1000&pws=0

(US$ 170) / 1000 = 0.17 U.S. dollars

are these converting referrals or just referrals? anyway, seems to me that common google adsense is a much better deal. please proof me wrong.
Kind of like 0MQ, but with JSON?
Megaupload hosted a bunch of its content on American servers located on American soil. It was my understanding that this was the justification for the takedown of that particular foreign company.
Apple's market cap just hit half a trillion dollars
So just "service management" is down, but the apps themselves are up? If so that's better than Heroku's recent downtime.
Really I never got the argument for disallowing variable-length arrays at the end of a C structure. I completely agree with disallowing non-PoD variable-length arrays as well as variable-length arrays in the middle of a structure though.
Free Search Engines Submission
Python MCU
The secrets of client services and communication
i don't FB friend people that i don't talk to IRL at least once every 6 months. in fact, i actively unfriend stale contacts every year (probably about 10% each time). i'm usually at around 75 contacts. so my "friends" are without quotes and actually those who i do care to follow.
Unbelievable is the level of comment on HN. Let's see, the law:

1. Aim to make available orphaned work.
2. Only applies to work unpublished for at least 5 years.
3. The public publishing right can be revoked by the author or publisher.
4. The author is getting royalties.
5. There is no censoring.

Let's compare to another somewhat related case of royalties land grab, iPhone publishing:

1. Aim to control and profit from other people work.
2. Applies to all iPhone published work from day one.
3. There is no alternative other than not publish your iPhone app.
4. Apple gets a cut, always.
5. Apple gets to decide what gets published or not, unilaterally.

It's funny also to compare this to, say, how the music radio system works. Hey, it's compulsory diffusion of work without the author consent with a government-prescribed royalty payment system. For current works. Ah, but music radio stations are mostly privately owned, so this all right?

All in all, the law is reasonable and makes a honest attempt to leave the author in control. I could even envision that small and amateur author would want their work exclusively distributed by such a system, if the royalties are fair.
No Joke: These Guys Created A Machine For Printing Houses On The Moon
Is it really trolling? Honestly, who uses Azure? Like most MSDN subscribers I did some mashing in it -- that still exists -- but did absolutely nothing real in it. My sense is that very, very few did anything beyond prototyping in it.

And just to add some opinion, the reason I wouldn't even consider it is Microsoft absolutely flippant ADD when it comes to online services. I have zero faith that they won't just shut it down tomorrow.
They do have a solution: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx

I've never used it though, as I already have old XP media and like using Virtualbox.
Running it now, and definitely feels much snappier than 10. Waiting on VS10 was one of my biggest gripes.
>Are they saying that an English company (where sports betting is legal) taking bets from English punters is running afoul of Maryland law? //

Didn't Britain just extradite (or at least accede to an extradition 'request') a young man to the US for operating a service providing media links (but apparently no copyright material) - where it's likely that his actions were wholly legal under English law and he never set foot outside of the country ...

Seems like USA has their way regardless of other peoples democracy.

--

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9013408/Student...
Can you elaborate what is the cert issue that causing the service down? It's always good to learn from temporary failure.
Do we have any Apple alumni here to give feedback on how this process works, in practice?

It reads--and maybe just to me--as a work environment as miserable as it is decadent.

The amount of cross-pollination between good engineers doesn't seem that large, due to secrecy measures. The knowledge that your project could be killed off on a whim, and that you couldn't talk about it--this makes even some of the gaming sweatshops look downright friendly in comparison.

(EDIT: Don't just downvote, use your words. How is the environment of extreme secrecy and compartmentalization one in which you'd wish to work?)
"It is also failing because of carrier stores and salesmen, who seem to be steering people away from Windows Phones to Android LTE devices."

There's truth to that. When I asked what Windows Phones the store had, the sales clerk gave me a surprised look and asked "Are you sure you want that?".
Technology out grew the nation state model. Look at the long arm of the IRS and how the US uses pressure on other countries to comply with it.

The nation states are going to do their best to reign the freedom technology provides back in.
Do you know where there is any good analysis of the kinds of adaptations that might be possible to this new reality of productivity?
similarly, check out hook-io by nodejitsu. i actually don't see the benefit of messenger.js at all in comparison. perhaps its simplicity, if that happens to be beneficial in your scenario.
if they don't buy computers nor upgrades, do they buy software either?

Many of our customers (mainly large companies and government departments) have pathetic computers, never upgrade (and in fact downgrade any new computer purchased to XP) and buy the cheapest hardware you can imagine, yet spend huge amounts on software. I don't have any stats on hand, but at a guess I'd say at least 50% still use XP.
The 64-bit version installed fine, but my mouse is not responding in "Run like Windows" mode. Keyboard is fine though. I was able to peek around. "Run like a Mac" doesn't work basically at all.
I was about to ask this same question. Zaarly does have quite a broad consensus of things and doesn't target specific demographics except for where you live.

I could see this being useful like all the examples above have mentioned. Not all college students are broke, and so you have a divide. It's definitely not a bad idea, but it may not be a "huge" idea. We will have to see.
They actually prevent you to use some elementary standard C++ constructs which are in newer VS but not in VS 2008. I hope you understand that you'd be able to write the same standard C++ code independently of the XP or Windows 7 had MSFT not removed some previously existing code sections from the DLL's linked with VS 11.

Yes I believe you're right when you say: "new development paradigms and practices they want to get rid of" even if it is a Freudian slip.
Simple. Use WebAPI if you want a public-facing JSON web service. Use WCF if you want a private internal SOAP web service. WCF was meant to be consumed by other .NET classes in LOB apps, not Javascript.
As an example, gcc generates nearly unusable code for a Via Isaiah in amd64 mode if you compile with -O1, and this has apparently been a known issue for at least 2 years.
What cool plans do people have for these if they can get their hands on one?
In my opinion it is ultimately up to you, to decide wheter you are happy or not, information certainly can give us certain truths that are "ugly" or unpleasant, but in the end you can control how you feel about it.
The domain seizure is nothing out of the ordinary. At least a dozen have been seized over the last 12 months, including those during the indictments of Black Friday (nb pokerstars.com, fulltiltpoker.com have been handed black) and Blue Monday (at least 10 domains still under seizure including truepoker.com).

The domain itself (bodog.com) was unused. The operation continues under bovada.lv (for US) and bodog.eu/co.uk for European custom.

Nearly all US-facing gambling operations have been moved to non-dotcom domains (dot.eu, dot.co.uk and dot.ag - for Antigua and Bermuda - the most common) for this very reason.

To read more from an industry perspective [full disclosure, i am co-editor of this site]:
http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-and-regulation/undercover-inve...

The domain seizure itself was of interest only as it showed the DOJ/DHS have a continued interest in trying to take down what it sees as illegal online gambling operators; that they can order a dot-com domain name seizure is par-for-the-course these days.
Everybody is talking about lack of support for Windows XP. Seems a little premature, but I've no doubt that XP market share will decrease over time.

Nobody is talking about lack of keyboard macros. And yet, keyboards will be the primary programmer input device for a while yet.

So it sounds like MS have done their research on this one ;)
Ow, you touched a sore spot, we Canadians did exactly the same thing by extraditing a fellow who was selling grass seeds by mail to US citizens. Strangely (sarcasm intended), we have refused such requests for the operators of online pharmacies, who employ a lot of people and generate sales for some big and influential Pharma companies in Canada.
i assume messenger works the same way, but the nature of hook is the processes are completely decoupled. essentially, you are just creating an event emitter that works cross-process. one benefit of this decoupling is it enables you to spin up and take down these processes without affecting the rest of the program.
it depends on how big your data is, but every query operation, every fetch, every write operation it charged. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html has details on how many read/write datastore API calls are made per operation. if u have to write in a new column for thousands of entries, then it will cost a bit, $0.10/100k operations, one re-write has 7 operations + incoming/outgoing bandwidth cost + instance usage cost will apply, it is hard to estimate actual cost.
"...to the post-Microsoft era", you mean. And end of an epoch; goodbye, it was nice knowing you, though I can't say I particularly enjoyed it.
Congrats. Can you share details on which programming language you learned and roadblocks if any?
Google, Why?
Are you going to start hosting torrents on your personal domain? Just don't break the law. It's really that simple.

I understand the "censorship/free speech" deal. But I can't really defend these guys, they were blatantly breaking the law. Like, there wasn't a gray area - they just jumped right over the line.

To make this a "true argument" we'd need the US to take down a domain that interferes with free speech.
Generally gTLDs are managed by private companies, not governments; the issue is that every company is under some government's jurisdiction. In this case, .info is managed by Afilias, which appears to be an Irish company and thus .info domains can probably be seized by the Irish government.

http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/info.html http://www.afilias.info/about-us
They can only seize assets that they have dominion over. Which now, apparently, includes .COM domains.
I would love to see a Windows 8 review by someone who understands both tablets and PCs... but this isn't it. The author has so bought into the Microsoft view of the world that I genuinely wonder what they've been doing for the past five years.

We are now entering the post-post-PC era, and its focus is the PC. A new, smarter, more versatile PC. A PC that lets users browse the web casually in bed and work with massive databases in SQL Server. A PC that can run a $0.99 news reader as well as it can run proprietary $99,000 CRM software. A PC that is as ideal for playing Angry Birds as it is for running a modeling environment that allows its user to build schematics for a skyscraper. This is the future of computing.

Er, no. No it isn't. That was the model that MS were pushing for a decade or so with 'Tablet PCs'/UMPCs and it has failed utterly. Most people DO NOT WANT a single device that can do all that, because the necessary design trade-offs produce a device that isn't very good at anything. Apple's realization of this fact (and their execution) is why they're the biggest company in the world, and why Windows Phone and Windows 8 are playing catchup.

The machine I tested Windows 8 on is a pre-release dockable Samsung tablet with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM. Yes, it’s a tablet with a fan. It’s also a tablet that can run your existing desktop-grade enterprise software, consumer software and lightweight Metro-style apps. Get over it.

A Core i5 in a tablet? What's its battery life? I bet it sucks. People aren't going to 'get over it', they're just going to buy iPads.

It's nice to see MS executing again. Windows Phone looks great. Windows 8 looks promising, if they can negotiate the backwards-compatibility waters of a new architecture. But I hope MS can see what they've been doing wrong for the past decade better than this guy, or their further decline is assured.
It looks like all Bodog did is relaunch as Bovada.lv
The articles you link to state that MS has brand problem. I agree with that. It isn't "cool", and people don't identify with it. As your quotes say, they are behind the times.

What I am disgreeing with is the original suggestion that these brand problems are the result of products that are abandoned quickly and/or have no future. I do not think that consumers regard Silverlight as a failed experiment, I don't think they know what it is, or that it even exists.

I think Microsoft's brand problem is that they are not seen as interesting or innovative, not that they ditch their products too quickly.
Dotcom's high life: Court grants $30k for three weeks
It is wrong. There are many registrars, but Verisign is the registry (i.e. where the records are stored).
there are quite a few options for syntax already in the mix, that people noticed already. If we will add DB-related stuff, it will confuse even more - too many options available in each language.
The question in my mind is whether they can sell the resulting "experience" in a compelling fashion...
Faster, Better, Higher – But How?
Interesting response to this, I'd not even known I could change my top color, or that I'd recently "earned" the right to do so.

Now I know I'm excited about changing it and making sure I pick a suitably "awesome" color, even though I'm the kind of person who usually leaves everything on default unless there's a good reason to change it.
Meeting Smart Grid’s Big Data Demands with JPA
As you note, the last benchmark does precisely what you suggest, comparing completely vectorized code that just calls BLAS. This is a really uninteresting benchmark, however, since everyone is close to C++ (although NumPy, Octave and R still introduce 20%, 69% and 165% overhead, respectively) — because you're really just comparing C++ against C++.

One of the key concepts behind Julia is that not only the end-user, but also the numerical library writer, should benefit from using a high-level language. In Julia, almost all of the library code is in Julia, and it's as fast as the library code written for R, Matlab or NumPy in C. There are also a lot of situations where vectorized code is either awkward or inefficient — especially in terms of creating a lot of unnecessary temporary arrays. Languages where the high-level language is slow force you to do everything vectorized — in Julia, you're not forced to do that. If you want to write a C-style scalar loop, you can and it will be fast (and you don't even need type annotations to make it fast, as shown by the benchmarks).

V8 is really impressively fast, but JavaScript as a language is not very well suited to scientific or technical computing.
The Verlet integration is just this part here:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/src/layout/force....

The rest of the function is calculating default forces and constraints for graph layout; these can be disabled, and thanks to the resilience of Verlet integration, you can easily implement custom forces or constraints in your "tick" event listener (as Shan Carter did in the budget piece a few weeks ago).

Given that it's a generalized physics engine, I like that @soulwire's code is organized into clean, modular units. That makes it easier to test and modify the internals. D3's force layout is specifically-tailored to graph layout, so I don't consider it necessary to make the implementation so modular; the requirements of the force layout are that it is fast by default, that it can be customized with incremental additional effort, and that it is convenient for the common cases.

Also, with larger graphs numerical integration is one of the few places where JavaScript performance (not just rendering and DOM manipulation) actually matters; while unfortunate, it's often necessary to make a trade-off between generality and performance. Still, I'm considering more modular reusable forces and constraints for a future iteration of the force layout (perhaps similar to the older Protovis force layout). But since custom forces tend to be very… well… custom, I think the best option is simply to modify the nodes' positions as needed and let Verlet do the rest.
>This is how we move forward.

This is how a monopolist forces us to move forward. Good for them. Not so good for us.
Reducing The Costs of Business Process Automation
Or you could use http://www.servicestack.net to host your same single web service on JSON, XML, CSV, JSV, HTML, SOAP 1.1, 1.2 endpoints out of the box, with no config or code-gen for free on .NET or Linux/Mono in ASP.NET or in a Console/WinService with HttpListener with C# or easily with F#: http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=785

ServiceStack also includes the 2 fastest text serializers for .NET (JSON/JSV) - many factor of times faster than all of the JSON serializers in .NET:
http://www.servicestack.net/benchmarks/

And if you add the ProtoBuf plugin you get .NET's fastest Binary serializer as well:
https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Protobuf-f...
> Works that are not challenged within this period, have their rights seized, so that they can be published again.

It's even more restrictive : only the public libraries can make these works available (and only to there suscribers)
You can get IPv4 addresses; the going rate is about $1/month/address. Whether Google's infrastructure can handle zillions of custom IPs is a different story.
Switch brands to escape the reality distortion field and maybe it will be clearer: Do you call your wireless networking adapter a "Centrino"? That was also a very successful (at the time) attempt to rebrand a generic standard into something that was sold by only one manufacturer. Lots of people in the early days of WiFi walked into stores asking for one of those "Centrino" computers that could get to the internet without wires. And they'd refuse to buy one without the sticker even if it had a perfectly good radio.

See the damage this nonsense can do? And you'd never buy into it from any vendor except Apple, where for reasons I can't understand otherwise smart people get suckered into thinking Apple designs innovative CPUs and LCD panels.
I wonder how goes an interview at their company.