skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but Windows is finally going somewhere amazing after many years of going no where

Windows 7 is an excellent operating system. It is secure. It is very robust. It is easy to use. It is feature rich. It connects to everything and uses everything. In what way is that going nowhere?

Same on the server side with Windows Server 2008 R2.

I think the competition provided by Apple is proving terrible for Microsoft. They are abandoning their core strengths while poorly trying to duplicate what led to Apple's recent success (which, it should be noted, is largely the same design philosophies that Apple has been using for decades, through their rout as well). It is a classic cargo-cult where Microsoft desperately tries to copy the playbook.

In the end they diminish the advantages they hold, while continuing to be deficient by the Apple playbook. They are following so they can never lead.

I must say again that it is telling that the people who are most impressed with Microsoft's makeover are the people who would never buy their products -- the Apple faithful. They still think that Apple is leading, which is natural when one follows the other, but they like what Microsoft is doing. That's great if second place accolades could carry a business.
haha - interesting edit that you have!

I currently have been making money the last 3 years by trading futures. It's been consistent, however, my co-founder of our fund has been trading for 20 years, lost his family, lost all his money, his house, everything. He was working at dominos when I took a little risk to give him some cash to trade, and boy was it a good decision. You could even say then, that the fooled by randomness theory exists - I was _really_ lucky to have found him and he was _really_ lucky to have been able to succeed. Regardless, it is possible. For every successful trader I personally know, I can give you 10 that majorly failed. It's human nature to want to try it - to be in (arguably) the most competitive business in the world. I offer my advice on where to start for free, but jumping into HFT in the really big markets is where people get crushed. Our current trading system can read a quote, send an order, and get confirmation about 2,000 times before you can blink! With that said, there are a lot of places (penny stocks, spread strategies, smaller equities) where you can thrive, and not have to trade against big machines. I will post to hackernews one day with an overview of his story and what we do
Show HN: LiveRover, Visual Event Discovery (Weekend Project)
Viable marijuana seeds are included in Schedule II of the CDSA. The law isn't enforced, but it's still there.
WebAPI is about to be merged into the new MVC 4 release.

Announcement: http://wcf.codeplex.com/discussions/319671
MVC4: http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4
Just for the record, I am as sick of this part of the book showing up on HN as everyone else. I do not post it here, other people do, and I apologize in advance for it showing up here all the time half-finished.

But, if you have a problem with this I ask that you write code disproving that the copy() function does not terminate for all possible inputs. Or, that you write a function that can check if a C style string is valid. If someone can do that it'd help me with the book.
Just tried it - it's pretty much as I expected... awesome! It's like Windows 7, only more polished.

Metro UI is quite cool, but you can spend most your time in the desktop mode if you wish (you'll have to use Metro to search for stuff and open apps).

One big drawback is that my favorite tool, Dexpot (virtual desktops manager) does not work - I hope it's not because they removed VD support, that would seriously suck...
I disagree, he missed a vital point.

TSA: Success

The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles.
I run XP on my 3 month old super-duper Lenovo. It might be "ancient", but it is not obsolete.
Needs to be privatized and then we can keep Kepler up and get James Webb launched.
Why Having a Technical Startup CEO Matters
When you are a Startup CEO, your job is pretty much every job. Most startups these days start with one "business" person and one "technical" person. But there really are times when it is hugely advantageous to have two technical people.
This is the kind of thing which scales pretty well -- there are lots of unemployed/underemployed people in most markets.

I think the difference vs. taskrabbit is that it being realtime requires the task-runners/execs to be higher quality and more committed, so it might not work as well in a market with 0% unemployment where everyone has a 9-5 job. I don't think that's a major risk for the next decade or two.

They can obviously raise pricing. At some point, people will pay based on the money they save, and runners might get really efficient at certain kinds of missions. If, for instance, a common mission is "pick up my car from the bar the next morning", the requestor might think it is a 2 hour task (bus or taxi, ...); maybe a task-runner has an efficient solution involving a folding bicycle, or two people. Worth $100 to me, costs 30 minutes of someone else's time who is happy with $25/hr, win/win at $50.
Studios would spend their own money remaking songs that had failed to garner interest in the first place? Not only does that seem like a way to make a lot of flops, but if the original flopped for some reason that's correctable by someone else in order to make a hit, then isn't it a win for everyone for there to be a hit remake (the original writer/artist at least gets recognition that they would otherwise not have had)?
Unless your for index overflows the MAXINT for the platform, or unless the system runs out of memory, or unless..

Your standard is unrealistically high.
Such as? Microsoft's case studies for Azure are absolutely dismal.

I note the other comment mentions Apple, which was a pre-release beta rumor based upon the IP that a beta iMessage lived at (since moved). It speaks volumes, I think, when such a disproven pre-release claim is still held as the example.
A recurring theme in these comments has been the hassles of doing things like fulfillment (can't use Amazon) and payment-processing (can't use Kickstarter) across national borders.

If you want to build the killer app for the 21st century, figure out how to help people route money and physical objects globally, with all these obnoxious borders abstracted away. ;-)
> I mean those are great technologies to work with, but his expertise is on C++ and native apps.

Last time I read one of his books (admittedly, over a decade ago) it was mostly _C_.
Although the author is unhappy, I'm inclined to agree here. The central question is, is Apple doing anything anti-competitive? The answer is no, since Apple isn't preventing anyone from being Amazon's books. Apple wants people to remain in their ecosystem, which is perfectly understandable. People may not like it, but Apple is not being unreasonable by preventing authors from advertising other booksellers.
Nope, you don't, in this specific case. My issue is with him asserting that an algorithm is automatically "broken" because you can't determine whether or not it will terminate. That standard would exclude every single programming language in common use.
I built this about a week ago while experimenting with the new SeatGeek Dev Platform, which we announced today. Would love any thoughts/feedback.

Github repo is here: https://github.com/jack7890/LiveRover
It is capable of doing 1080p decoding. I no longer need a Blu-ray player, Boxee box, Roku box, anything. I have an HDTV, I plug this into it with XBMC installed. Boom. I can stream anything from anywhere. It's also AirPlay enabled. Any TV just became a very smart TV for $35.

If you're not familiar with XBMC, prepare to have your mind blown.
Perfect body after trying Proactol
I want to show you the power of Proactol for a quick weight loss. I will show you a picture of a woman who is amazed by this weight loss supplement and Istrongly recommends it to EVERYBODY who wants to lose weight!
This is more or less the opposite of the conventional wisdom on this topic; Malkiel, Bernstein, Swensen, Andrew Tobias all wrote whole books more or less dedicated to the premise that you should invest passively through indexing.

Here's a great Derek Sivers comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157768

I'm sure a bit of stock picking isn't going to kill you, as long as your portfolio is mostly passive. (Every time this discussion comes up, someone points out Malkiel picks a few stocks for himself).

On the other hand, there is a whole financial industry lined up more or less directly against your interests in picking stocks; they have better research, direct access to company principals, influence over the markets, a drastically lower cost of trading, and the ability to wait out irrational conditions far longer than you can stay liquid.

I'm doing what Sivers suggested; it makes sense to me.

On the other hand, I've been telling a friend of mine to stop investing Apple since, oh, 2006. So, grain of salt.
No, here's how you fix it:

Treat them as students in need of an education. Ignore all else. They are students. They need education. Everything else - income, place of birth, place of residence, race, sexual orientation, anything else - is completely and utterly irrelevant.
I'm sorry, I don't get what everyone is on about.

The first thing a power user will do is to go to the old-desktop and stay there, basically not interacting with metro at all. There is no point, it's about as useful as the winkey+tab is on Vista/W7. "Cool" but useless for real work.

And there seems to have been numerous improvements to the windows experience (outside metro), the ability to pause file-copying etc. proves that they still have some focus for the enthusiast.

For everyone but the average Joe the new "metro-UI" is nothing but a bundled application that you will only use when you want to demo something or for some very light use (on a tablet for instance).

Just as Media Center is today!

How does a bundled application make the whole windows experience clumsier? If it is clumsy, close it! Sure, the start menu is different but who uses the start meny on windows today? All apps that you actually use are pinned to the task bar...

And that is how everyone that does real work will use their windows 8 machine, just as they do today in windows 7. And no. MS will not phase out the "regular windows", that's just moronic. Contrary to popular belief but people will actually do work in the near future as well, not floating around in a fluffy cloud with touch devices.

You read it here first. The mouse and keyboard are not dead.

Curious to see how broken the metro is on a multi-monitor setup is though. Any UI that doesn't scale well to multiple monitors has failed miserably in my eyes (hello OS X + Unity + Metro(?)). And that's not an edge case (at least it shouldn't be for anyone favoring productivity).
This is a great idea. Certainly your employees cost more than $25/hr.
Yeah 2010 was quite painful compared to how fast VS08 was. VS11 is not back to VS08 speeds but it is a good improvement over 2010 thank god. The big problem now is this new UI. I find it much harder on my eyes than previous versions. I didn't like the glossy/plastic look 2010 had and while this is a step away from that look it is more of a huge leap in a random direction rather than returning to a softer, cleaner look.

Today has been quite disappointing with Win8 CP and VS11 leaving a nasty taste in my mouth after the first bite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Drugs_and_Substances...

It appears that, while non-viable seeds are explicitly legal, there does not appear to be any prohibition against viable seeds, unless they are considered a marijuana "preparation". I suspect there's some case law floating around where a court has decided whether or not cannabis seeds are considered a marijuana preparation.

Edit: Erowid is somewhat helpful in this regard, although the linked article is broken:

http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_law.shtml
No Bullshit: Sell your iPad like a boss on eBay
sorry zed. wasn't trying to flame or steal. I'm just curious as to what people say.
It's like you've been reading our emails... Completely agree with both of your points here! We're already talking about ways to allow non-owners to create a more robust profile, and are thinking about how to grow each user's graph beyond direct friends, including some elements similar to LinkedIn (e.g. your direct friends giving an endorsement to their friends, so when you see a friend of friend come up as an option, you see 5 other direct friends have vouched for that person and their love/ ability to watch dogs).

Thanks so much for the input, and would love to hear more as you continue diving into the current release! =)
I'm noticing that in the last day or two of the LaunchRock site being live.

I think my strategy will be to use the LaunchRock site as a secondary method of getting my message across. I've been talking to niche users and appending my site to the end of the e-mail.
Not having Wifi kills this option for me personally.
Backbone Inheritance
But why aren't they going after the Americans who are breaking American law, rather than the non-Americans who are just doing business?

But see also this (someone else posted it on HN, but I can't remember who or where):

(http://cphpost.dk/news/international/us-snubs-out-legal-ciga...)
How to balance work and life as a freelancer
>The analogy for finance, my industry, would be a hedge fund registered in the Caymans either trading US securities or trading with Americans in the United States (it gets sketchy if an American citizen comes to Switzerland to do a transaction) not getting to ignore SEC rules just because they're "not based in the US".

That comparison doesn't seem to quite fit. If a company violated SEC rules it would have to be trading through a US exchange and would therefore have agreed to abide by US rules. In this case we have US users who are breaking the law by doing something illegal in their own country. They should be punished, not the foreign website.
Function Piping in Python
Experiment: Cold emailing businesses
kennywinker, every single technology can be used for "good" and "bad" purposes. Taobao's Tengine is a fork of Nginx, a great one at that, I might add. It has nothing to do with the Great Firewall. It's open source and the code is available for everybody to see.

The innuendo, knee-jerk, hypocritical, "guilty by association with big/bad Chinese gov" reaction toward a solid open source web server, shared for all to play with and use, is quite disgusting, frankly.
Blob contributions box
And if someone needs one this week instead of waiting 2-3 weeks, then they're free to spend $300. Otherwise the seller is just playing to buyer's stupidity. Oh well.
To be specific, my main issue is with this statement: "This provides a formal proof that the function is defective because there are possible inputs that causes the while-loop to run forever or overflow the target."

By that standard, one can easily construct a proof that any Turing-complete language is "defective".
Information About Cats - White Cat
I hope you're right.

But luckily ~> isn't completely broken. In my rails apps I use ~> x.y.z to ensure that I only pull in patch level changes.
I as well am interested in hearing more about the learning process.
Just recently we had a big party [1]. We definitely outsourced a lot of the logistics and organization of that in various Exec tasks. More day-to-day, it's very random.

I think we give each ZeroCater employee something like 5 hours worth of Exec time per month. It's well worth it.

[1] http://blog.zerocater.com/and-there-was-food-for-all
The writer is just 18 years old.
Thanks, will rewrite this today
Patrick, I'm going to email you in a month when the initial flood of emails you're going to get dies down. I don't have much to offer except possibly interesting conversation about software and educational software in particular.

This comment is more a reminder for me than anything. :-)
HP cuts 275 jobs as webOS transitions to open-source
Sequoia Capital hits Latin America with Scanntech US$10M investment
Foursquare has 2 people born on February 29. What're the odds?
Does this beta have an expiry date? As in, if I upgrade am I going to be surprised by it deactivating in ~3 months time?
Before the TSA, didn't you have to wait in a similar luggage screening line anyway? Other than the addition of the backscatter machine, checking your id before you enter the line and some other procedural changes what is different?
First, programming languages aren't algorithms.

Quite a few algorithms can be proven to terminate on all inputs (even malformed ones). Zed is asserting that when you have available an algorithm that will definitely terminate, you should tend to prefer it over an algorithm that may not. I tend to agree, especially in an educational text because that's where a lot of people will start picking up habits, both good and bad. Non-terminating algorithms aren't broken in general, but this one is because there is a terminating alternative.
> Apple emphasizes that iOS and OSX fundamentally different platforms and will stay so, and says they're borrowing relevant ideas from one and bake them into the other (and vice versa).

I agree. But I think you think that this mentality is set in stone, just as console gaming must have a standard controller, or personal computing must have a physical keyboard. Touch is the marvel of today. Voice may be the marvel of tomorrow. Eventually a keyboard and mouse will be the old way of doing things. Your knee-jerk reaction to that sentence is also mine. I can't see a world without keyboard and mouse, but that is because nothing better currently exists. Remember: Unreasonable men with unreasonable ideas.... Touch only supplants certain features of the keyboard and mouse. Apple was unreasonable. Nintendo was unreasonable. What technology will be the next to pull us out of our comfy habits? The technology that improves upon the existing infrastructure wins, not the one that asks us to change our habits or do more work.

Microsoft is asking their users to do just that – more work. Does it work in Metro? Standard?

With iOS, I don't have to ask. I know. It is too underpowered to handle intensive applications. I don't have to look it up in the "app store" to find out. I don't have to look for "designed for X" stickers or buttons. I immediately know because my technological emersion and knowledge of what is possible makes this argument for me.
Cupcake App Wars
Yahoo Mojito Client/Server Javascript Framework Preview
Changing Android Boot Animation - Marakana
Hacker in Hyundai adds massive button and ups web conversions 62%
The original 14 years with an optional extension sounds quite reasonable, honestly.
IPL 5: Kolkata Knight Riders IPL Team 2012, KKR IPL 5 Team Players List
Here is the list of Kolkata Knight Riders IPL 5 Team Members List. Get full squad of KKR Team in Indian Premier League IPL 2012.
IPL 5: Kings XI Punjab IPL Team 2012, KXIP IPL 5 Team Players List
My argument against ColdFusion sucks and other related putdowns
FYI: it's not compatible with 10.5.
Your managers are algorithms.

Your onboarding costs you $20 for each Exec you sign up - in this economy, your acquisition cost for them is likely near zero because WOM and free PR will give you more opportunities than you can handle.

You bootstrap CS with either the founders or one of your close friends, building systems to support the common cases (e.g. "Exec flaked on me") and using T1 support as a system-level T2. Your margins are asymptotically the same as selling iPhone apps at $15 each ($10 minus pocket change either way), but you'll have many customer LTVs in the hundreds. Eventually, you'll have a proper CS team in place like e.g. Airbnb and the'll involve themselves in < 5% of orders at a fully-loaded cost of $12 per incident.

We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work. The major gamble is that there exists sufficient market demand among the upper middle class for semi-interchangeable gophers. It doesn't strike me as obviously a billion dollar business but then again I thought "Young ladies will happily pay money to stay the night at private residences" sounded categorically insane the first time I heard it and we already know how that story turns out.

P.S. Numbers here come from "Big dumb megacorp with a traditional CS department assumes an American FTE talking on he phone costs $12." There's all sort of ways you can cheat that assumption, beginning with not being a big dumb megacorp.
This is a nice site about cats.
To Learn To Code or Not, That Is the Question
re: high traffic. A buddy and I hosted the static parts of our privacy activism page youropenbook on github pages (it was initially all static). This was during the privacy scandal of spring 2010 and as our traffic really ramped up we sent a message to the github folks to see if they minded at all.

They gave the go ahead.

We served millions of pageviews, had a significant impact on the debate at the time, and github pages took it like a champ.
Customer satisfaction only means that people who BOUGHT one like it. It says nothing about whether all the people who DIDN'T buy one like it. What does say something to that? The sales numbers.

Those sales goons also steer people toward Android and away from iPhones as well -- for a simple reason that the carrier tells them to because the carrier makes more profit on Android phones -- but yet iPhones continue to sell extremely well.

Accept reality; most people don't like Windows Phone 7.
IPhone: iPhone rollout Black Berry once more.
Care to count the billions spent on those "differences"?
And I can see why they're giving it away, because it usually costs more than a Tomtom or a smartphone with Google Maps and it's not nearly as good.

I have Hyundai's navigation system in my car.

In side by side tests my Tomtom or my tablet running Google Maps can route me to the same destination in ten minutes that takes half an hour with Hyundai's navigation, assuming that it can get me anywhere near the destination in the first place, which it usually can't.

After the Hyundai software failed to get me anywhere my destination or had me driving around the approximate area of my destination in circles indefinitely on the first four attempts I made to use it, I gave up and went back to using Google Navigation on my Android device with my Tomtom as a fallback.
DotSE is not at all trustworthy. Use DotTEL. Host nothing at MC.com, but rather have it redirect to MC.tel, and populate MC.tel with a link to the main page of your content, as well as links to mirrors of that content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel
This is a beta version of the product which will sell for around 10 thousand pounds in the UK (it's an "Ultimate Edition"). Can you really expect it won't have an expiration limit?

I expect it has the limit though I still haven't found out what it is. Anybody knows?
Is there a marketplace like this for quick programming tasks?
Flipboard designer craigmod on the future of publishing: Hover cars?
I was excited to try this out and was very impressed with the quality and speed of the service.

Back when I was working at Big Co Inc., the shared admin assistants were an incredibly valuable resource to leverage your time. Unfortunately, it's not a feasible option to hire one at a startup. Exec changes that.

It's a great option for times when you need something NOW but can't or don't want to stop what you are otherwise doing. Examples: taking a mac to the genius bar, getting printer ink, getting batteries.

Also relevant is this cdixon blog post about how the internet is changing what a "job" is. [1]

[1] http://cdixon.org/2012/02/26/the-internet-is-reshaping-our-e...