skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows Phone isn't selling because it came out 4 years after the iPhone. It's an absolutely failure at the leadership level. They ridiculed the iPhone when it came out. What's the leadership going to say "We really dropped the ball on this one"? Ya right...blame anyone else.

I'm not arguing that Windows Phone isn't better (nor am I arguing that it is). I'm arguing that the reason it isn't selling is 100% internal to Microsoft and isn't merely a marketing and perception problem.
I really hope Haskell/Snap starts getting picked up by everyday web developers so someone can start exposing ridiculous things like:

> 11111111111111111111111111111 - (length [])
=> 1729917383
That's for Lackluster users to decide.
It's an interesting concept, but a terrible article e.g.

"The primary reason for this move is to lessen China’s reliance on western intellectual property.

There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture."

So it's going to avoid foreign IP by choosing a chip archecture 4/5 of which depend on foreign IP, or building one of it's own that (given the crazy world of IP) will almost certainly inspire lawsuits from the incumbents. That makes no sense.

If IP is the issue why not cut out the middle-man and just compulsory licence any patents that cover national standards? I'd heard that China was threatening to do this previously and it's an entirely sensible thing that every country should do even if would enrage the current monopolist cartels.
I know this guy and he's awesome. The world's better off if you help his startup out :) I have no iphone though...
Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. 1 year now!)
Hello HN. I like this community a lot and want to see if there's anything I can do to make you a little more successful. No strings. To give you an idea of what I might be able to help you with, let me tell you a few things I've done to help others...

- I've been organizing my own Arduino workshops and teaching laymen how to build things (there's a session tomorrow, actually!),

- I'm participating in the venture-lab.org internet class and helping people learn to apply the Business Model Canvas along with lean startup methodologies,

- I organize tech community social events that help build our young community here in South Florida,

- I advise a few local single founders who are without technical expertise and guide them toward good long-term technical decisions for their startup,

- I'm an early adopter, enjoy playing with new tech and can provide strong, constructive, specific feedback,

- I'm a relatively accomplished developer and engineer,

- I understand good design from bad design. Aesthetics are not lost on me,

- I have a family and juggle a mediocre work-life balance that's gradually improving.

If there's something I can help you with, just ask here or @mikegreenberg on Twitter. Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out. :)

This thread actually marks the one year anniversary that I've been doing these and it's been quite satisfying for everyone involved. I hope this inspires other people to help out even if you don't think you have anything useful to offer. Actions like this will only improve our community (locally and across the net).

Cheers!
Mike

PS: I'll typically reciprocate the amount of effort/consideration that you've shown in your request. If you show me that you're thoughtful about the feedback you want from me, I'll be more apt to give you something useful. I'll accept any requests made before the end of today and will attempt to respond by the end of the weekend.

PPS: You can check out my previous submissions if you want to see the sort of feedback I can provide.
Conventional wisdom says you should lose no more than two pounds a week, which you can accomplish with a 1200 net calorie diet, i.e. consuming 1200 calories plus any calories you burn from exercise.

Using C25K, a running app, and MyFitnessPal, a calorie tracking app, I lost 38 pounds in four months last year. I'm 5'7", 26 years old, and went from 192 to 154.
Klouchebag
IP lawsuit against a national unified CPU architecture in China? Good luck.
Interesting idea. Think of the disaster scenario where they miss the moon and the thing is caught in the earth's gravity well. That would be horrific.
Let's not downplay the few years you'll need to spend to get productive with Haskell first.
I completely agree.

It's the sort of thing that happens when a priesthood in a field comes to possess the One True Knowledge. They start to issue statements like "you can't trust your intuition" and "you don't understand this enough to like it yet"
Very good point, and I actually should have thought about that a little more. I loved the culture and town of both - Stanford's campus is just amazing, but I could also see myself fitting in really well at Harvard, especially with all the stuff to do in Boston. Thanks!
I almost thought Mark Pilgrim was back...
200 is on the low side? I'm amateur and hit that commonly during games. I think JulyZerg was on record to hit 800 at one point. Lord only knows how that was physically possible. I would credit the source to TeamLiquid's Wiki (I believe) but I cannot search it while at work.
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3333298
You are joking, right? You think the incumbents are going to sue China for IP theft? In what court?
I'd suggest the excellent Heart of the Comet by Gregory Benford (an astrophysicist), a story about mankind's first attempt to live on a comet, including all the hardships that come along with it and the changes which occur there and on Earth over time.
U.S. Amasses Stealth Jet Armada Near Iran
If I follow the iTunes link, it says "this is not available in the UK store but it is in the US store".
I have a question. Do they always ask for passport scan and credit card photograph, or I fall under some special category which makes me suspicious?

Going by the rave reviews, I ordered the 512 MB vps to evaluate, and was greeted by an email asking for my passport and credit card photograph. I don't feel like doing business with them anymore.

I am a bit uncomfortable about sharing my credit card info. But since I already have shared my card number, I figure I can attach the card photo.

And even if I comply with the ridiculous request of providing a photograph of my credit card, most of the times I use a virtual credit card. My bank lets me creates virtual credit cards and link with my card/account. The card doesn't exist physically and it lets me reset the transaction limit. I reset the transaction limit before making a transaction ensuring I can't be overcharged. They would turn me down because I am concerned about my financial transactions?
Sorry, still figuring out the details of HN. Clickable?

http://www.quora.com/Choosing-Colleges/How-does-a-star-engin...
Thanks for the reply! I do want to do a startup eventually, but I may also want to go into banking or finance (I've been working at a hedge fund locally and like the types of problems they can solve algorithmically).

And thanks for the Quora post, that analogizes it pretty damn well
Debate at N.Y. Public Library: Can Off-Site Storage Work for Researchers?
Objective C: a quandary
I've deployed some Node.js code on both Azure and Heroku, and I have to say the Heroku experience is in many ways superior:

* Both seem to do Node quite well, supporting both web instances and workers

* Deployment to Azure can take 30 minutes. On Heroku we average 30 seconds

* App setup on Heroku uses environment variables and the simple Procfile. On Azure you need to deal with poorly-documented XML files (most documentation deals with how to generate those with wizards in Visual Studio)

* Heroku's toolbelt works on Linux, Mac, and Windows. With Azure you have to use Visual Studio or Windows Powershell

* Azure provides some useful services like table storage and message queue. But Heroku has a much wider array of nicely-working add-ons to choose from, many of these things you could run on your own servers as well, like Redis or Postgres

* Last time I checked, Azure was quite expensive. This may have changed with their recent pricing cuts

* On the plus side, Azure lets you choose where to run your app geographically (USA, Europe, Asia?)

Compare:

http://universalruntime.tumblr.com/post/14303346830/running-...

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/nodejs
Yep, works now. Haha I may be reading into the Harry Potter metaphor a bit too much, but I've always thought about myself as a Slytherin. Sure, I wanted to be Gryffindor, but I always felt like more of an impostor within Gryffindor than anything else
Ruffle Collection
Calling a Loongsoon laptop more free than other available alternatives is a downright Orwellian perversion of language. I understand the specific meaning of 'free' you are using, but juxtaposing such speech with China's horrific human rights record (and non-state and quasi-state terrible labor practices, top to bottom) is chilling.
Love the name your price part, but even more than that I love the 'what we make' part. Puts fair burden on me.
> 6. If you get a massive quantity of some valuable material it'll change the economics. That $20 trillion won't be $20 trillion with the added supply.

For comparison, back in 2010 or so it was estimated that all the money in the world was about 70 trillion. That asteroid, if brought in it's entirety and valued at 20 trillion would represent around 30% of the world's money.

They'd have to do some pretty ingenious financial tricks to keep it from extreme devaluation: at the current prices and money supply, there just isn't enough money in the world to sell it off within the next 50-100 years - possibly more.
If only that were the case.

[1] Judge says: "If you commit another crime or are found in violation of your parole you will go to prison for X months longer".

It's a simple analogy that ignores a lot of extrinsic issues, but punishment isn't always a sufficient deterrent.
The Open Source CEO: Jim Whitehurst
Colorful Summer 2012
I have written a textbook. Now what?
For the past 25 years or so I have been writing books
on various aspects of programming in my spare time. My
first book was about compiler construction and I sold
a few spiral-bound copies of it in the early 1990's.
I am passionate about writing, but pretty much clueless
about marketing.

In the past months I have created a compiler construction
primer with strong emphasis on the practical side and
published it at Lulu.com. The book homepage is here:

http://www.t3x.org/reload/

I have received quite encouraging feedback about my works,
but most people who buy my books stumbled across them by
accident. Some of them have asked me why they had not heard
about me earlier, given the fact that they found my books
quite illuminating.

So here is my question: how do I make my books known?
I have announced the latest one on Usenet and on reddit.
On reddit the posting disappeared after a few hours, most
probably because some folks thought it was "spam". Up to
that point, comments were very positive.

That's pretty much it. I have run out of ideas, so any
thoughts you might to share with me on the topic of book
marketing would be highly appreciated!

EDIT: sorry about the messy formatting. I obviously have no
clue how this web 2.0 stuff works. :-/
After over a year of hosting in the cloud (amazon aws) and spending alot of money in the process we also made the switch to hetzner recently...
The cloud and its benefits is nice and good, but the computing power you get for 100 bucks from companies like hetzner is just incredible.. Of course there are higher costs of setting everything up, but on AWS we had todo most of the complicated stuff on our own anyway..
I think that the office ribbon redesign was rather brave for MS. As a non-expert user of Office, I found it easier to find commonly used features--I can imagine how for experts it would be annoying--but for new users, it really helped with discovery and I'm considering the idea for some of my own projects...
This is IMHO far more useful and interesting comparison than the original article; thanks for taking the time to write it.

I think the concrete examples really help show up the differences between the languages here. I might quibble with your initialisation in ruby (I'd expect it to be initialised with a string and hide the internal representation), but it is clear here why the Haskell type system might help you avoid issues with changing an interface and forgetting to change things which call it (though I can't say I've run into that a lot in Ruby, I can see where it might be useful, particularly with large groups collaborating or a large program).

I would argue that the compilation step is what is responsible for finding errors at compile time rather than runtime, but then the type system is perhaps required to enforce that.
Check it out, great guy..
I don't know if the rest of the world is doing much better by allowing (W)intel to have a stranglehold on the computer chip market.

This does sound like one of the many boondoggles that governments oversee, but I'd say there's still a role for big government in this area, setting proper RAND-Z standards, busting cartels, supporting open source and the like.
How did you manage to support yourself while hosting that many servers? I had thought about buying some servers but wondered how I could make enough to break even.
> Of course it has it's downsides compared to S3 but when you compare pricing in "TB" to S3, you'll see how redonk the S3 pricing is.

Remember, comparing "x TB of storage" to S3 is silly. S3 is designed to replicate your file to multiple datacenters (their site promises ELEVEN nines of durability!), provides things like a BitTorrent tracker for your files, etc.
Does anyone here have actual experience to share on using Azure that has also used AWS? I'm building a node.js app and by default I'd use AWS but should I consider Azure?
Serving Atom Feeds with GitHub Pages
That's on the input side, but what about the output? You can't compile and run an app on your mobile phone yet.
hi Mike!

I have been reading your offer posts for a while now and always wanted to ask you something, but never thought i had a question worth asking.

Today is different :)

I would really love some constructive criticism on the usefulness, usability and viability of my little side project.

I know there are one a penny of Twitter schedulers, but what I wanted to build was a simple emailing service where I could schedule a bulk of tweets in one go. Do you think that could be useful to others beside me?

I tried to post before as a Show HN post but didn't get much attention... perhaps not getting too much attention is also a feedback i should think about, though..

the project: http://buffero.me
It's special because it's SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit), which is far from easy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation in order to understand why it's such a feat. Pegasus was three stages.
It's normal. Myself and another person I know had to do it too.
Erm...No :)

Well ok, I get what you are saying, but a machine intelligence would faithfully and honestly apply these perfect values every time without bias. When have you ever known a flesh and blood Government to do so?
is it better or just cheaper? (seriously, I'm interested in your opinion) did you switch for costs only or are there benefits to Azure as well?
What I never understand when reading about Skylon, is why the project try to do single stage to orbit directly? A reusable first stage would in itself be valuable and neither cost so much to develop, nor be risky by walking the edge of weight gain etc. ssto could be version 2.

(I'm not that knowledgeable on the subject, flame me if your day has been bad, just add information. :-) )

Edit: Symmetry, SpaceX is itself trying for reusable stages. As far as I can tell, it should be the sweet spot?
I was just about to point this out. It caused me to not wake up on time and miss a major family event. It was also one of the reasons I got rid of my iPhone. The (lack of) backlash that this bug caused really made me understand how ridiculous the situation had gotten with Apple's infallible perception.
Seems like such a simple thing for the movie studios to do - legally - and generate some positive PR for a change... but no.
I believe that he made a great work there, but it is still very low level material for a newbie, or at least he cannot sell it easy to a newbie (even more to me cause I don't have a CS background). I was just watching Noir in Clojure. This seems more rails oriented or at least the website is more appealing for a newbie. It looks that there is a little bit of that magic that rails seems to bring: "Make sure you have leiningen installed, that way we can use the lein-noir plugin to create a new noir project. Four commands later, your site is up and running." This sounds great for a newbie. You don't need to be one day to discover how to install.
Have we forgotten about AMD, VIA, ARM, and PPC just to start?
Have you ever had anyone proofread it ?
Java 6... from 2006? I'm sorry, but innovation and Java do not belong in the same sentence. All of the innovation has moved on to dynamically typed languages, because it grew tired of having its balls fondled by JVM/TSA. Public Static Void Main? No thanks.
The obvious counterargument is that you can get everything required for Java for free and there's the MS small business deal where you practically get carte blanche access to MS tools for free for (3?) years, and that still doesn't sway many startups towards those toolsets.
I hate to generalize, but (I'm about to anyway) all my old representatives (dem or repub) voted Aye. You'd think that old people would enjoy some sort of anonymity. However, if is this being sold as a counter-terrorism method I could see why they'd vote for it.
A System to Automate Scientific Research
EVE is coming to real life. Watch out for space pirates out there man.

"2mil ISK OR PODDED"
I don't think it's anything malevolent on the behalf of Samsung, I think it's just that the S2 was a very very popular phone (I'm the happy owner of one) and therefore the S3 launch is kind-of a big thing. But really, we don't need every slither of news about it to be published. It's just link-bait from BGR.
By Weitz website I just get to this. It seems interesting: http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/
It said it is not available in US Store for me! Anyway, it is strangely back now. I sent a support request to Apple using iTunes Connect. Not sure why it happened!
That's awesome to see. This was part of tenderlove's keynote.
That trimming is extremely poor as well -- doesn't just clip parts of the conversation from previous messages, but parts of my current message! It drives me up the wall. I have had it trim my entire e-mail, then have to awkwardly explain to the recipient that they should click those three dots to see what I'd written. It's insanity, and when I called Google tech support about it... oh wait, LOLsupport.
Thanks. We put it together in a couple of hours for our own purposes and a bit if fun. A YC alumni suggested we put it out here. It's great that it's helping other folks.
“We’re teaching computer science with all the life sucked out of it.”
I've never seen anyone running a reverse auction to rent their old hardware out before:

https://robot.your-server.de/order/market

I guess if they're not short of space for hardware & cooling then this is a profitable way to put old hardware to use until the demand falls below the running costs. I wonder what the reliability is like?
A feature that may very well make me finally jump over to RoR. I've recently built quite a large site, and the only current bottle neck is when a few emails need to be sent off at the same time with attachments, and to be able to add that into a "que" and let the user continue browsing the site instead of stuck on a loading page (if only for a few seconds) would make the current set up ideal.

Incidentally - if any one has any way of doing this in PHP without having to setup cron jobs (and not using node or its derivatives), I'm really open to any ideas!
interesting - not sure if it's really needed though - I've used Redis and Resque before and found it's performance was blisteringly fast. (Resque was made by Github https://github.com/blog/542-introducing-resque)
As for Rails, Python, etc. being the most common tools in SV, I tend to this it might be because they are free.

I don't want to go all Richard Stallman on you, but I think it might also be because they are Free. I mean, I've never bothered looking into MS dev tools because I assume they'll only run well on Windows, and they'll be designed for a server stack that will only run well on Windows, and then I'll be tied to getting my dev tools and server stack from one company on one OS, and it will be Microsoft.

It happens that I like developing on a Mac with a Python IDE right now, so I freely admit that I'm both biased and ignorant. But I do know, know, that if a year or two down the line Apple gets too controlling, I can switch to Windows or Linux and keep using my same stack with tools that are just as good. And if Guido decides to become Tyrannical Dictator for Life and screw up Python, he'll have no real power to do that because the community can do exactly what they're doing without him. Are those things true about MS dev tools?
The Greatest Machine That Never Was
Data Center Trends and Investment
I'm doing some research to find out more about the U.S. data center market. I am having trouble pinning down the size of the enterprise data center market and whether or not the different tier levels are regulated and maintained by a central organization. Any insight is much appreciated.
If I had an iPhone, this would be right up my alley, but I don't. Anyways, when I went to the product site, something didn't seem consistant. (https://elevationdocks.herokuapp.com/)

If you scroll down the page a little, you say something along the lines of "help us fund our next product" vs "pre-order"(in the headline). If your real goal is to muster up some money for new product dev, say that in your headline! I would be more apt to give you extra money in your name your price offer if it was more clear that this was explicitly going toward future product development vs just a pre-order. I know the money ends up in the same place either way, but I hope you get my drift.
Sorry for being unclear. For the actual transactions, there is a TAN required, but for sniffing around your transactions, seeing all your bank account information and so on, all you need to log in as the 6-letter password.
I'm slightly confused by this. Is it not the case with rails that many of the .rb files are generated via rails?

I think you're over thinking / pessimizing what happens with haskell code.

1) for any self contained project (library or executable) in haskell, the directory structure determines the module names. if you're wondering how the functions imported from the Foo.Bar module are implemented you simply go to the subdir #root/Foo/Bar.hs

2) Types. when you're writing use case specific code, you are going to define use case specific types, and they will be declared.
More over, it is good practice to give explicit type ascriptions to haskell code to make sure that it does in fact have the type you expect.
This means that you can jump into a module and by also recursively looking at its imports (and you know where those are in the fs), you can figure out exactly whats going on.

3) cabal-install (cabal), and your project specific project.cabal file make life great.
Why? the foo.cabal file will tell you which module has the Main function if you're making an executable, what other packages (and their versions) your code might be importing, which language extensions are enabled, etc.

Point being, there are no need for "framework specific conventions" of the sort you're concerned about because those problems are solved by Haskell specific conventions :)