skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What criteria are you using to determine an appropriate expected learning curve?

Is an operating system upgrade supposed to be like transitioning from a 2008 BMW 3 series to a 2011 BMW 3 series?

Or is it o.k. for the learning curve to be like transitioning from a 2008 BMW 3 series to a 2011 Dodge Grand Caravan where the brake, accelerator, and steering wheel remain the same, but all the other controls, the instrumentation, and cabin layout are different?

Any change has a learning curve which can feel steep at first. I've personally experienced it when changing browsers among IE, firefox, chrome, and Opera (never mind mobile versions) even though they all pretty much work the same way.

And my father makes the same face when he has new email from someone he doesn't know.
We don't have a TV in our house, but we do have iPads. I would argue that an iPad is a much better TV - given the right app, it can really help a child sit down, focus, and learn things under their own steam, without that Brave New World programming that comes from most TV sets.

Its a matter of balance, though. My kids get tons of time with the blocks and marbles (we play "kügel-bahn" like mad in our Austrian household - a form of "real-world" Marble Madness) but then we're also partial to a little Pacman now and then. The kids love both options, but given the choice, and if the sun is shining, they'd much rather be outside kicking dirt and climbing trees. The point is: engage your kids, and don't ever leave them alone watching TV. That is pure evil.
Fasting to Beat Jet Lag
Serious question: if Microsoft is convinced of the "Post-PC" meme, so Metro is the future — and the Start Menu is in the trash — then office work should be done on an iPad.

So what's the disconnect?

I'll give my opinion at the bottom. You've pointed at the leaky tablet paradigm, but let's just assume Office takes a year to catch up to Windows. That's historically been the case.

"Normal" windows apps should be phased out rapidly and Metro everywhere should become the new Windows UI.

Since when has real office productivity needed a Tablet UI? It seems obvious to me that the iPad (and iPhone) are for casual use or travel. It may be productive to review sales figures, or tweak the wording in the presentation, while on the plane. Anything more requires a keyboard in my opinion.

The physical difference between the iPad and a keyboard is the primary reason I think office workers will hate Metro. Second to that I see them hating Metro because they just want to "get stuff done." Metro lacks the streamlining that the old apps have taken years to achieve. Instead of being able to add a formula with one click, you have to learn a whole new set of interface tricks.

Microsoft wants a quick success. So Metro will probably get ditched for something new by 2016, regardless of its core merits. (Obligatory: I'm biased: I think there is a niche for PC's and a separate niche for iPads. I see no Post-PC world, only an admission that Dell's profit margins will never return to 1990's levels.)
Users want desktops and tables. They have different UI and that's OK. You operate cars, trucks and excavators in a similar way but not exactly the same way.

MS wants to translate its power from desktop monopoly to tablet market. And therefore they play against users.

It seems that MS Windows team is too powerful to let smaller teams cannibalize Windows market share. "Innovators Dilemma" case?

Personally I would import only tablet features which make sense for desktop OS. For example app sandbox and market, standard app upgrade api, notifications.
To be fair, it rule one of persuasive writing to put your thesis at the beginning of your argument and follow with your supporting arguments. As it is, you're changing your entire argument in the second to last sentence.
How to contribute to open source without being a programming rock star
I think I'll go with this :)
Mozilla just spent two years telling everyone that they were not going to do this, and posting justifications as for why not. To me this is a serious blow to their credibility.

They fought 2 years for getting patent-free video recognized, probably at the cost of some of their userbase, and a lot of anger from web-developers who saw their lives complicated.

Today, they seem to be reconsidering their position because they think it's a lost fight.

How is this a blow to their credibility? What should they have done? Instantly bend over next time? Stubbornly refuse to reconsider and lose the best hope for a truly free phone OS because nobody would want to use it?

If you lose a war, it's never pretty. Kudos to Mozilla for taking a hard stance against patented standards for as long as they could. They deserve credit for that.
Umm .. there's no correlation between test scores and intelligence these days, either though ..
GoLimited - UK Limited company formation £4.50, where's the catch?
A good example is regularization. You have nice proofs saying that your classifier is optimal, then you tack on a regularization term to it, which breaks your optimality proof but improves your classification accuracy. It seems unexpected, but it's not really all that surprising when you get down to the details of it.
How real people will use Windows 8
Amusing Toy Story Series by Aled Lewis
A Brief Beginner's Guide To Clojure
Are test scores the only indicators of a child's development? I know enough people who have excellent test scores but have no initiative, no confidence, no curiosity, no hunger for learning things that are not on the test, no drive and no creativity.

Of course, anecdote != data, so meh. But I do have a hunch that TV and social media both breed a passive consumption habit that can be hard to detect and even harder to get rid of.
>I break about half of those rules and it works very, very well.

Can you go into more detail about which rules you disagree with or find unnecessary?
`Whilst this is a very timid example, it does help illustrate how a lot of preprocessors’ built in ‘helpful’ aspects actually go against our ideals; .nav li a{} could (and should) just be .nav a{}.`

Not if .nav li a{} and .nav a{} are specifically meant to be differing nests. They could but might not 'should'
"Have a Lexmark wireless printer? Tough luck, there is no way to print to it from Linux."

Lexmark printer compatibility page for Ubuntu;

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsP...

setting up a lexmark x4650 printer for wireless printing with 64 bit ubuntu;

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1692003
> To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward if not simpler than the traditional way to interact with Windows.

It may be convenient, but the real problem here is discoverability. There's no way you can realize that screen edges are interactive unless you either knew that beforehand, stumbled upon it on accident or saw a YouTube video explaining it.
> To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward if not simpler than the traditional way to interact with Windows.

However it's mystery meat: it provides no clue as to what is active and what is not (in fact, it provides no activable element at all). There's a reason why WP7 mandates (if not requires) side-arrows or that a bit of next screen's content be visible on the edges of the current screen: it hints that there is something there, it's a very nice clue (even with that, the most frequent criticism of WP7 is that it's hard to know what is active and what is not).

Completely hidden "edge of screen" elements are very nice but only work if you know they're there already. What do you do when you don't? You're boggled, and either you try hunting the interface for active areas (looking for pointer changes, old-school adventure games style) or you give up and go back to something you can use at a glance.
"It's harder to work on an ambitious idea, but not proportionately harder."

Sure it may not be harder to work on an ambitious idea than to start an Italian restaurant (or the startup equivalent - something that is ubiquitous and stands a good chance of succeeding if executed correctly).

But although I acknowledge that the possibility of hitting it big from opening the "restaurant" is small compared to an ambitious idea, the chance of the restaurant succeeding and being an ongoing concern is magnitudes greater than the ambitious idea.

The simple fact is non ambitious ideas don't pay off for investors and that's why investors are biased to not encourage those types of ideas.
ctrl + R is nice, helpful automation, though somehow limited - eg. search & edit command easily.
A "real" user is not the average user. It can be a lot below the average. Another thing to mention is that despite the changes being huge (but not really that huge), the learning curve is smaller that switching to the Mac or Linux for example.

You may figure out how to quickly launch the browser and a couple of apps on the Mac, but you'll need months to get used to it and know the few times per month used functionality.
My son (4yo) barely watches TV (maybe one hour a week or so) but spends a good amount of time on the iPad.

There's a wide range of activities on the iPad, going from plain video games to pure learning bits (letters, sounds, cooking, 3d moves etc) which makes it much more interesting than only "video games" IMO (and this generates a lot of discussions centered around learning too!).

On the frequency of use: it's pretty much like email for adults. You have to learn when to stop and when to do something else, learn to keep a balance.

At first we had small cards (like 2 x 10mn and 1 x 20mn for each day) to ensure he would not spend more time than we thought was good for him.

Now he mostly plays at his own rhythm, and tend to say at some point: "Dad, I played a lot on the iPad, now I need to take some fresh air".

Apart from that, all the remaining signs (learning to write, space placement, handling legos, social exchanges, sport etc) show no "damages" caused by the iPad :)

In conclusion: for me balance is everything (but like for most subjects); and there's a lot of good things to pick in the iPad.
Looks like you forgot the t in without for "Participate withou the app?"
I think MS should make a Windows: Bifocals.

My dad does the same thing, bifocal eyeglasses and a belly make for some weird contortions when trying to view a monitor.
Yeah, of course its the low-tech solution that makes sense, but I really believe this is a case where the Nanny-state like grip that Apple has over our iPads is not really delivering workable technology. Would it really "kill the cool" for Apple to add a pref about what the lock-switch can do: "Turn off Touch/Disable Home Button/Mute Music/Mute all/Lock Device" .. seems really, sorta lame.
Well, there's Pokémon, which sold "quite a lot" and had lots of collecting / grinding.

See also Animal Crossing, which gives people plenty of collecting and display opportunities. There are fossils, furniture, fruit, paintings, songs, haircuts, fish, bugs, etc etc. AC appeals to casual gamers because you can do 10 minutes a day and get enjoyment from it. It also appeals to hardcore collectors because there's so much to collect, and some of it is "rare".
I don't see a post by Gary Kovacs. Link?

(If you mean the prominent Asa Dotzler, he's neither the CEO nor is he saying the "opposite" in my book.)
Yeah, that's what I mean. I am sympathetic to onemoreact's opinion above that gaming does imbue the child with a useful mastery over abstract/virtual environments and activities, and that those skills are growing more important as we humans augment ourselves with technology. I just think that 2 is probably too young; those benefits are almost certainly going to accrue even if the child never touches a video game until, say, 5.

There's a good TED talk where they go into the differences in language processing in a child of 12 months vs 15 months. Infants and very young children are doing so fucking much to deal with learning the basic rules of the real world, and how to process human language. (One of the notable things is that American children exposed to a real human speaking Chinese to them on a regular basis were able to differentiate the sounds of Chinese as well as Chinese kids; those in control groups exposed to video of people speaking Chinese didn't fare any better than regular American kids.)

I feel like the awesome and mysterious stuff going on in the child's mind at that age in order to come to grips with the real world, in its awesome complexity, is too important to be displaced by addictive recreational activities that can just as well come later. I don't want them to become masters of the small and limited worlds in which games exist, at the expense of a diminished mastery of the intricacies and awesome breadth of the actual world we live in.
I second all this. How a company like this raises VC is just dumbfounding. Why the F do graphic designers need to raise VC to pump out more infographics. Isn't that fad over with anyways?
As it's probability^1.5, it makes the probability lower, and not higher, i.e., x^1.5 < x if 0 <= x <=1.

I think this might be a tweak due to data scarcity. To compute p(e), there's tons of data to build a model. On the other hand, p(e|f) requires for you to get a lot of parallel corpus (texts that's written both in English and Foreign language) which is not easily doable.

As a result, p(e)^1.5 * p(e|f), lowers p(e) as it's supposed to be too high compared to p(e|f), imho.
>"I seriously have no idea what Microsoft thought when they decided to abandon the start button."

I suspect that they were thinking about the mountain of user data they have and drawing reasonable conclusions from it.

My family members use the power button to shut down Windows, not the start button. They tend to use icons to launch apps, not the start menu. Though atypical in some ways, I suspect these are not among them.
There seems to be a serious fear of change. Should we converge on some adequate solution and stop moving? Regardless of whether Windows 8 has a good user interface or not, it should be judged against the effectiveness of the change, not just because it is different.
> How is this a blow to their credibility?

Because he's not saying "we tried, but it didn't work out in the end". He's saying there is no justification not to use available platform decoders. Yet they were not shy to provide them in the past. He's not addressing why those are no longer relevant arguments.

Obviously the real reason they're doing this now is because on their new mobile platform, the Gecko runtime is all there is, and without it supporting H.264 playback, the platform would be considered incomplete at launch more so than their desktop browser is for not supporting it. I get the motivation. I'm not saying it's wrong - I don't agree with it, but that's not the point here. The point is how bad it makes Mozilla look to change their stance so willy-nilly.
The biggest difficulty in Bayesian modeling is usually choosing the prior i.e. the P(W) term. There are a few maximum entropy techniques, but basically the rule is: "what works best".

In this case P(W) is a 1-gram probability which is clearly wrong, because it amounts to saying that every word has a probability of appearing that is independent of its surroundings. For example, while 'the' is very likely to appear you don't want it to appear next to another 'the'.

Even when using more sophisticated priors that take n-grams into account, one never has a real model of the English language, because that will depend on the context, the period in which it was written, the linguistic domain…

That is why tweaks are actually justified theoretically.

Another interesting thought that popped out in the comments to the original post is that if one uses a statistical mechanics interpretation of probability, where P(W) = exp(-H(W)/T) where H is some energy function and T is temperature, One can interpret the 1.5 factor as lowering the temperature and making the probability less fuzzy.
This is great to hear! I used a similar construction on my final project (electrical engineering) but left the appropriate mathematical proof (if any) into the Future Works section. The classification rule I found to be better was:

c = argmax_{c \in C} (log(P(c)) + Sum_i (N_{d,d_i} \times log(P(d_i|c)))

where

c - best class
C - set of classes
P(c) - prior prob. of class c
P(d_i|c) - conditional of the word d_i on the class c and
N_{d,d_i} - frequency of word d_i in document d

Excuse me for the possibly weird notation.

Virtually this expression means it places a frequency power upon the word probability, which is basically assuming (naively, I think) "words that are more likely to occur should be empowered".
The proliferation of cookie-cutter incubators isn't a good thing for London or any other city.

The value of Y Combinator is a combination of its brand, connections and the huge experience of the partners there. Compare the experience of the various YC partners[1] with those of any other incubator, and it's quickly apparent there's no competition. UK incubators seemed to be staffed by accountants, bankers and lawyers who emphasise teaching applications how to "write a business plan" rather than "make something people want"

1 - pg - Viaweb, pb - friendfeed & gmail, Garry - Posterous & Palantir, Geoff - RocketMail & Lala, Sam Altman - Loopt, Harj - Auctomatic. Etc.
The rigorous mathematical justification this trick works better than not using this trick is that speech recognition works better when used. It is for theory to explain reality rather than the other way around.
Scale is definitively an acquired taste -- some of us have just acquired that taste before.
If I didn't know better, I'd interpret MS's actions as trying to drive desktop computer users to Mac and Linux; kind of like their redesign of Office (ribbon) driving people to Google Apps.

MS doesn't seem to be "protecting" it's market share anymore; it seems to want be seen as an innovator, rather than make its current users happy (which seems a very odd philosophy for a company with 90% market share).

The only way I can understand this is to believe that MS is consciously "ignoring" internal usability data in order to push forward an innovation agenda.
Meteorite smashed through Oslo roof
Yep, soon I'll update Yoke with that.
You are right.

English version says: "So... I'm just gonna open up for questions. Anything you wanna know... you know... as usual on any(?) subject but probably about what we are doing today"

Spanish version says: "Bienvenido a [...] 2012 donde (...) podrá ver de primera mano como Microsoft Research esta estudiando las tendencias tecnologicas clave que definirán el siglo 21."

Which translates to something like: "Welcome to [...] 2012 where (you)'ll be able to see firsthand how Microsoft Research is studying the key tendencies that will define the 21st century."
> But first time use isn't the relevant metric for an activity which one will do for years and in which one engages for productivity.

Having to abandon all the skills you had in muscle memory for years and lern an entirely new set of clues, moves and small, day-to-day tricks surely wont increase your productivity.

This is basically like changing your keyboard layout (which is running unchanged for approx 150 years, btw) every two-three years when the "new version" comes out. Or like remapping all your Emacs/Vi keybindings with every "new version". shudder

It is clear an simple: MS has basically declared the desktop dead (not profitable enough), and Windows 8 is supposed to encourage (i.e. force) current Windows devs to write tablet-compatible apps, which is where MS sees the profits of the future.

It is a bold, incredibly ballsy move, they're putting all their crown jewels (the UI familiarity, the backward compatibility, the Win32 API, the developer community, the stability required by enterprise customers) on the table for the ONE BIG BET.

And it is not even likely that they'll win. The market is already pretty saturated and mature where they want to go. It is not a vacuum, where they can get in and become the only system provider like they were on the IBM PC. Even if they get in, it will be nothing more than the proverbial foot in the door, nothing more. I absolutely cant imagine this going well for them. You only make giant bets like this if you're either absolutely confident that you'll win because you can accuretely predict the future, or if you're absolutely insane.
It's very different from TV. Anecdotal, but:

My two-year old loves to push buttons. Remote controls, toys, any buttons with some feedback (and many without) are fair game. On iPad/iPhone, spends as much time on any typing app watching letters appear as he does on a game (only tried a game or two). Trickiest bit really is getting him out of whatever menu he wanders into - author was dead-on there.

TV he'll watch for 10-15 minutes and wander/play with something else, sometimes glancing up when something catches his attention.

I'm with you that with either device these are doses of 15-20 minutes not "babysitting." But "at all" is extreme.
>Linux won't be ready until you can download a file from the Internet, run it, and install it just with a couple clicks (and not "you need to set the 'exectuable' flag!" error).

That way of installing software has to go. Seriously. Stop it. It's horrible.
I've been looking at these companies and would be interested in any advice as to whether I should register a company myself or use such a service. I've heard people say such things as "if you can't register a company yourself, you won't be good at business" however I'm interested in developing the product, not form-filling. Views?
I should be clear, I have used Ubuntu since 5.04 (Debian before that and I used Mint for a bit, too).

I'm not saying Ubuntu or other distros are bad. Some releases have been fairly well executed. But they generally don't introduce anything groundbreaking. And they have very little OEM support. A very large majority of "the world" keeps the OS installed on their computer at the time they purchase it.
If it were so simple, someone would have done it already. In reality, you're talking about a massively expensive legal battle with an uncertain outcome.
Apple could make this much more obvious than it is. Would be a good improvement to the app store.
I'm reading it and I'm not logged in. I think I remember this is a bug in google groups, it will ask you to log in if you have an old google cookie, it used to happen to me too a year ago, try to delete your google cookies.
Reviving The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum
This technology, once perfected, will usher in a new era of fraud and crank calls.
GPS doesn't, but GLONASS does:

GPS Time is designated as being coincident with UTC
(USNO) at the start date of January 6, 1980 (00 hours).
GPS Time does not count leap seconds, and therefore an
offset exists between UTC (USNO) and GPS Time (at this
date in April 2007: 14 seconds).

Unlike GPS, the GLONASS time scale is not continuous and
must be adjusted for periodic leap seconds. Leap seconds
are applied to all UTC time references as specified by
the International Earth Rotation and Reference System
Service (IERS). Leap seconds are used to keep UTC close
to mean solar time. Mean solar time, based on the spin of
the Earth on its axis, is not uniform and its rate is
gradually changing due to tidal friction and other
factors such as motions of the Earth's fluid core.

http://webone.novatel.ca/assets/Documents/Papers/GLONASSOver...

This is the best overview I've seen of all the pros/cons with regard to UTC and whether leap seconds should be abolished:

http://www.agi.com/downloads/resources/user-resources/downlo...

Basically, much in the same way that we all despise DST (or date differences between Julian/Gregorian calendars), a certain part of me wants to know, if we humans last on this planet long enough, that our descendants thousands of years from now won't look back and curse at us for being idiots and deviating from celestial time.
Are they doing well? I doubt there are 10,000 games doing well on the iOs platform, and iOs people actually pay for their apps.