skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Why is manipulating people inherently bad? The author simply throws:

> "The downside to this model is it that the company’s and user’s interests can never be aligned because the user is not the one paying for the product."

But he doesn't expand on it. To get users you still need a good product even if it's free or users would use something else. Part of the lessons behind increasing click through rates is to build a desirable user experience. The users are not wiring you money directly, but they're still worth money indirectly. Just saying "every free product must be bad for the consumer" sounds like a simplistic over-generalization.

2) How is every business not manipulating people instead of just machines? There isn't a black or white here. You don't manipulate machines simply out of love to build a genius technological innovation. You do it to manipulate people. Each piece of hardware or line of code is put in place trying to solve the same questions the author poses for manipulating people. Which GPU I need for users to buy games? Which algorithm gives better recommendations that the user will actually click on? Businesses manipulate machines while manipulating people. Only hobbyists do otherwise.

3) Is he using Apple as an example of a company who favors manipulating machines over people? Apple are the most extreme example of the contrary. They're genius at manipulating people. Many here will point out their technology are just small evolution over what existed before. But it's their genius marketing, branding and expert people manipulation skills that convince users their products are status symbols worth of their loyalty. And there's nothing wrong with these. Every business wish they had the people expertise that Apple does. That's what make businesses work. It's genius people skills that brings genius machine skills into user's hands.
AOL Instant Messenger developer team laid off, reports NYT | The Verge
I won't assess "better", but high profile trials do drive changes in legislation. From changes to kidnapping after the Lindbergh baby until the present day with "Caylee's Law", people need to have a stake (even a vicarious one) to really care about changing the law.

I think Cuban is right here, if you take away people's Facebook, they're going to want to know why, and they're going to be pissed when they find out.
I've been successful in getting to talk to an actual _human_ in no other way than through the #appengine channel on freenode. Quite a few of the devs on the appengine team hang there, might be worth a shot.
It’s not curation or aggregation, it’s just how the Internet works
I remember reading the term for the first time in The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas. They give the experiences of one of the authors as the origin of the term, but I would really be interested where the term was used the first time. Personally, I'm sticking with the technique ever since. Although I've never managed to use it in an office environment with other people. I don't know if this is caused by the environment or if it simply feels too awkward to me.
This is not true.

Your ideal universal system may ration on medical need. There might even be one in existence that does so...

...but I really doubt it.
Social seems to be to Google what mobile is to Microsoft... they might have good stuff here and there, but nobody's ringing the bell.
Virtual Machines in Your Browser
Between attack ads and blog posts it seems like Google is all that Microsoft have to discuss lately. Not sure if Google is flattered by this obsession.

Wonder why the author chose not to post on his personal blog, a Microsoft employee bashing Google on an official Microsoft blog rings hollow, specially with the use of the same generic talking points.

And using engineers as PR people isn’t the most sepathetic thing either.
Disagree, there are plenty of problems this solves. For example, this service could allow users of certain platforms to utilize tools that don't compile or are difficult to compile on certain platforms.
The reason for acquiring a lot of virtual memory is to save memory and improve performance.
I do know of term sheet offers within 30 minutes. However, not for such a high valuation though. But it isn't outside the bounds of reality, especially during particularly 'frothy' times - like mid-last year.
Oops! I mean can, not should.
Bear in mind that all of the I/O developer session videos get posted at no cost after the conference.
It's time for a global ban on antibiotic use in agriculture. These multidrug-resistant species we're breeding are the single most likely cause of the eventual extinction of the human species, far ahead of nuclear war.
Ideas are cheap, tools for writing/directing/coding/filming/editing are cheap--hell, cheaper than they've ever been! I would disagree that this gamble is unavailable to anyone of even modest means.

If you can't raise sufficient funding, frankly, that's a your problem. There are a lot of people (myself and cofounders included) who prefund by working some job (of varying degrees of satisfaction) and diverting the funds towards development of their own creative enterprises.

In the absence of patrons, yeah, we fund ourselves, and one day it'll pay off--or it won't. That's life.

Novelists are great and all, but it seems obvious that if you cannot write something quickly enough on a budget, or in your freetime, and it isn't good enough to get picked up, well, sorry. The system should be in place to let you fail fast and figure out what to do next.
"Talk to the hand"
Gephi's an incredible project for making big node-link diagrams. It has a selection of layout algorithms and statistics you can apply to nodes and edges. I used it at a hackathon to visualize the Marvel Universe social graph:

http://exposedata.com/marvel/
Weird choice to post such an article on msdn.com, of all places.
I think most notable backlashes against Bootstrap came from the designer community. They do have valid points, but one cannot ignore the motives of the designers. Obviously due to Bootstrap, importance of designers at very early startup stage has diminished significantly.

This debate around Bootstrap seems really similar to enterprise web developers who used to use Java and C# complaining about Rails and Django a few years ago.
I'm implying both that, or that I distribute some software that infringes a US patent. How do we know that the overreaching arm of US corporations won't try to sue some little guy in the UK over this?
This is exactly my use case and I was excited when I saw inPulse posted on HN a couple months ago [0] until I realized my phone can't run cyanogenmod. Also, at the time I thought $200 (for the black watch) was a bit expensive until I found out that my coworkers are wearing $600 watches.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290884
I don't think JPA requires or encourages you to use static methods.
How Nimblebit broke the rules of free-to-play, and won
Freelancers, partner up
It definitely has some good points, but there are a few issues to consider:

* Compulsory licensing for trademarks doesn't make sense; their purpose is to ensure that the consumer knows who manufactured the product. If you can't exercise control over the people that use your trademark, it's useless.

* Patent litigation is too expensive for small firms and too cheap for large ones; figuring out how to fix this would be a big win. That can be done by adjusting the actual cost, the outcome probability, or the judgement amount. Time until judgement is also a big factor.

* This system doesn't address the problem of submarine patents, that are kept hidden for years until a lot of firms are unknowingly infringing, and then get sued for large damages. It needs to address how a company knows whether or not it needs to license a patent for its technology. Perhaps holding a patent on a technology should give you "clear to operate" approval, and existing patent holders must review and challenge patent applications before they're granted.
80% of the antibiotics sold in the US are ingested by animals: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/news-update-farm-a...
It lowers the cost of food production but also lowers the effectiveness of those antibiotics in humans and creates drug resistant bugs.
Yesterday me and my girlfriend were looking for a car related service, and we found a site which supplied that service. It was obvious that it was using some kind of generic design template, so both of us got a bit suspicious, and not until we had researched the company for quite a while were we OK with doing business with them. It just didn't feel serious.

I feel the same way with a Bootstrap site that isn't customized at all - I would hesitate doing business with them, because if you don't have the resources to put a day on at least _customizing_ your design, are you really trustworthy? Of course you can be, and it's not a completely rational feeling, but I would be surprised if I am the only one with that gut reaction.

For minor tools (such as http://dochub.io) and other small projects, Twitter Bootstrap is awesome and doesn't even need much customization, but I don't think it's a good idea to use it uncustomized for a business.
After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses
The thread where mkjones is parent explains why mostly.

The issue is that you use remote utilities hosted by other resources but as people already pointed out there are utilities provided already that essentially allow this. What "ru" would potentially be is more of a wrapper or alias to existing commands.

I feel that the quote he references in general would simply state that if users are seeking the ability to execute commands on a remote host then there are security implications. We have secure tools for accessing remote hosts and working but generating a catch-all utility would be an act of "reinventing the wheel"
While a new search engine or email reinvention sounds daunting but lucrative, in my opinion the most impactful "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas" are like Kiva'.
Valid reasons to quit Google, but then he joins Microsoft?
I think your math is a little wonky. From 2010 to 2011 was a 50% increase in price with no corresponding duration increase; From 2011 to 2012 was a 50% duration increase with a 100% price increase.
I think it is a given that you shouldn't use boostrap in it's entirety for a startup. However, using bootstrap for parts of the library is very effective. I'm using the excellent 'Bootstrap-sass-rails' gem, which lets you include all or just parts of bootstrap easily in the Rails asset pipeline. I then get the mixins, forms, type treatments, dropdowns, css reset and more for my project. Without the generic graphical styles.

Also, all of the less is converted to SASS.

Here's the gem if anyone is interested: https://github.com/yabawock/bootstrap-sass-rails
I'm not too sure about that just yet.

Part of your registration may be to checkout a Google Code project in the language of your choice and run the resulting program with a prequalification code they give you.

That would be unfortunate if you're trying to register on your phone, but they could easily just mention in advance on Google+ that you're going to need to be on a desktop computer.
Is there something particularly strange or unique about this story's formatting that it couldn't have been rendered in HTML?
Can we have a drop down for Google Web Fonts to use. That serif font is either not on my system or is... not pleasurable to my eyes.
The gamble isn't available because the payoff isn't there. Why would any company pick up something that you've already made if they can't make any money on it due to the lack of copyright? They can publish it without paying you. Even if a publisher does pay you, some other publisher can undercut them because they didn't have to pay you.
Something that's already possible today: an ensemble for mobile computing instead of a monolithic device. You have a 4G wifi hotspot, a bluetooth headset, a tablet, etc. I'm curious how you could evolve that idea. Maybe with wearable computers, maybe something else.
It would be nice if DuckDuckGo were listed among the search engines on "Settings > Safari > Search Engine"
SXSW: 5 Great Things About Being Minecraft's Director Of Fun
From the perspective of wanting to work for a technology company, and not an advertising company, I suppose it makes sense.
Recognizing the harsh practical reality is not "giving up"; if you're acting under the constraint that the end user of a web service must also be the customer, then you cannot under any circumstances get people to pay the actual costs per/customer of building something like Facebook or Google. There are other businesses that you could build at that scale that do fit under that constraint, but not web services that depend on millions of simultaneous users to produce any value at all.

The best estimates I have for what it costs google to provide service to one customer for 1/year is $20 < n < $24
and Facebook is probably more, can you name even one person of your acquaintance who would pay even $12/year for either of those services...? Even if hardly anyone else was using them? Before they were big?

So yeah, impossible, at least in the given constraints; like asking for a 50 seat airplane that's self-piloted, safer than current small planes AND costs less than $500 to build.

You might argue about my definition of impossible, but this isn't reddit, and I hope you recognize and understand that difference.
Northern Lights Paint Sky Over Eyjafjallajökull Volcano (gallery)
In an office environment any co-worker can be a rubber duck for you. Of course, if all you can find are people who are knowledgeable about what you're working on, you may not need a rubber duck.
Hah, nifty!

For a hackathon this weekend we wrote a simple terminal and Ruby IDE using WebSockets. It's good stuff.

I'm pretty sure the sockets + thin-client with JS GUI will win the day.
I don't have a problem with the twitter.com ui, it over engineers some things but overall it's usable... what sucks is that twitter.com is ALWAYS either completely down or not working properly. I don't know if it's unique to my location (England, I assume they do regional load distribution) but I just can't use the site 50% of the time, pushing me towards using a client which I don't want to do.
These have to be the most beautiful photos ever taken - not least for the amazing story behind them, and the fact that they show a side to the Icelandic volcano disaster that nobody else thought to seek out.

Anybody wondering about the plausibility of them, check out the captions and read the article!
AT&T Threatens Plaintiff With Termination Of Service Unless He Shuts Up
His failing was, as you say, confusion and incompetence

The same could be argued about 'umms': that the 'umms' aren't the problem, confusion and incompetence is.
I've been using Searchify since early beta and it's been rock solid. All I needed to do for our indexes was change the URL and key and it just worked. If you were happy with IndexTank you should be just as happy with Searchify.
New beta version for 4DO, the open source 3DO emulator
Problems with PHP
My impression is that Microsoft is actually very diversified and focused on technology. There was an article a while back about where the various large companies (Google, Apple and Microsoft) make their money; Microsoft had the most diversity by far.

Microsoft is also not afraid to fail or try random things, which makes it much like the "old Google" in this blog post.
Why don't people like software patents? Because their power (total monopoly over an idea) is out of sync with the difficultly in acquiring one (stick an engineer in a room with a notepad for 10 minutes, then get a few lawyers to translate it into legal hieroglyphics).

But you are correct that nobody really cares when the defendant is a multi-billion dollar company. Facebook can look after themselves just fine. If Yahoo were suing a startup, the backlash would be far stronger.
Microsoft is unlikely to shut down MS Research.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx

[edit] If I have my James Whittaker's straight, he worked at Microsoft before going to Google. If I don't, he probably didn't.
I am not a Google Employee - but I do want to defend Google here. Yes, Google used to be a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. However, in the process they built a huge amount of UX Debt.

Bad UX was forgivable a few years ago, but that is no longer the case. Google has not figured it out yet, but with the web maturing, I am glad that they are trying to evolve to be a more UX focused company.
It's sort of a cultural thing amongst a lot of Microsoft employees, especially older ones (or in this case, ones that have returned), to run their blogs off of Microsoft's blogging platforms.

In this regard, Microsoft's culture actually does a very good job of encouraging its employees to blog from the inside - I've never felt quite the level of direct engineer access and communication working on Google platforms as I have on MS platforms, even in cases where Google's platforms are actually superior. (Chalk it up to Google groups being a little opaque and Google product blogs being run by product managers.)
Fans of startup literature, if they haven't already, should also read Microserfs: http://www.amazon.com/review/R357AO45OH8U5S

...but not on the Kindle due to some creative typography.
I think a ban is a bit excessive. A ban on anti-biotics in humans would be devastating. However, more restricted and controlled use under specific circumstances, much like how it's controlled for people, may be an appropriate step. However, I admit that I don't know enough about the situation to be able to provide well informed advice on the topic.
No, it means there's no doubt. I in fact believe the opposite of what you wrote wrt it being a coincidence. And I don't doubt it.

Got it now?
I avoid making generalization and try to stay away of anthropomorphizing companies. But this isn't the first, nor second, nor tenth time I watch Microsoft trying to smear the competition. Which doesn't seem to be common among other companies. It does gives us outsiders the impression that it's part of their company culture to try to sell more by smearing the competition instead of by building better products.

How does that work on the managing level? Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this? Is it just a culture that gets passed indirectly through informal conversation between employees that influences this behavior? Or is just the PR firm they hired that keeps insisting on the same weapon?
Exactly.

I'm repeating myself in this tread, but seriously, I recommend to everyone taking a look at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/ - it has all the numbers, including e.g. power densities of solar and wind plants in watts per square meter.

According to that book, there's no way solar or wind could compete directly with nuclear. It just doesn't add up.

There is no way to have any serious discussion about energy without doing at least some rudimentary calculations and comparing numbers, instead of adjectives and hopes.
Yes, nice idea, I'll work on that.
That was my reaction too, but then I thought: everything he outlined in his blog post is everything that MS is not. In fact, it's what MS is often criticised for- that it has no central authority, teams that don't cooperate, so on and so forth.

The conventional wisdom is that people leave big companies to form startups. If he did that, Whittaker wouldn't be able to do anything that he wants to do- startups do not have the resources for large-scale "big thinking" and idea testing. They have a laser sharp focus on one thing. It sounds like Whittaker has no interest in that.
$900 is not that much, I'm actually surprised it's so low.

A GDC All Access pass is $1,950, and a GDC Main Conference pass (typical) is $1,350.
Thank you, L. Ron.
I guess a better way to write this is

diagonal <= 0.000275774245 * sqrt(horizontal resolution^2 + vertical resolution^2) * viewing distance

Edit: Wow, something interesting came up when I was playing with the numbers. If you assume iPad 3 resolution and iPhone 4 viewing distance the diagonal comes out to 7.8" inches.
Microsoft's diversification is not really a good thing. IMO, it is no use building lots of technology without being good at any of it.

My belief is that Microsoft will improve, but I would not go there because they already have their technology goals right. (I would go to Microsoft as an intrapreneur trying to fix their technology/innovation story).
Last Modified: June 13, 2008

And hosted using PHP4.4.4

Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:31:47 GMT
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from narthex.toykeeper.net:3128
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4-9+lenny1
X-Cache: MISS from narthex.toykeeper.net
Connection: close
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) PHP/4.4.4-9+lenny1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Do as I say, not as I do.
Definitely first world problems here. I mean, I am with him on the point about being selective when choosing entertainment, but.. maybe we have too much entertainment to choose from and too much free time?

I mean I know that you will see things like that Hans' guys' TED talk about how much better everything is for everyone now, but things are still pretty fucked up for a LOT of people in the world. Look at Mexico.. or even a number of countries in Europe are having a really hard time now.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who have morally bankrupt hedonistic worldviews where human life really has little or no value and their only long term goals are to "have fun". This is a common problem with our culture.

Your goals for life should not be to have a few thrills or entertain yourself. Your goals should be to effect positive change in the world. There are many suffering people, many problems to solve, lots of innovations and changes that could really improve things for everyone. That's the meaning of life. Not getting a few chuckles. And everyone can potentially make a very significant positive impact if they take their lives seriously.

Also I think we need to start innovating outside of the computer. We have real problems to solve. Its definitely easier to say than do -- I am a software developer -- but I really wish that this programmable matter stuff would take off, or at least maybe people would really start to take seriously ideas like ultra-local food and energy production.
Animated GIFs max out at 8 bits of color (per frame, but still). The animation cycle of GIFs starts when the image is loaded and can't be controlled via JS. Yes, if you just wanted an 8-bit orb bouncing, it's a fine choice. For a game sprite, it's less so.
I think people here are being ungenerous towards the author. Too me this story sounds genuine and not like a pr move dictated by Microsoft. It strikes me to be a personal account by someone who's trying to make sense of the past and actually mourning what he believe is the death of old Google. This deserves our respect as professionals because inevitably we are all going to find ourselves in a similar situation, trying to learn from the past and seeking understanding by our peers.
This is the dumbest 100+ upvote link ever.
I disagree. Search used to be fast and clean. Ditto GMail. Even Maps has gotten slower and more cluttered.

Google's recent UI changes are about branding, not UX.
2011 aprox. $1100 and 2010 like $800
That's an interesting idea about running Windows 8 on the iPad. It might actually be great for devs looking to see how their Windows 8 apps would work on a real tablet.

For those of us behind strict corporate firewalls, it might be a good way to check email and other things on a remote computer.
Just a question to better correlate your position on hedonism: do you believe in after-life?