skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People tend to conveniently forget that it's the consumers in an economy who define a monopoly. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. If a monopoly occurs because the majority of consumers are giving that product/service their money, then it must be deserving of it. If enough people are dissatisfied with the quality, they'll turn to new business, and the monopoly will cease to exist.

The market has and will continue to regulate itself without legislative interference. I see no reason for the government to get involved with Apple's private marketplace.

Edit: I'll put it this way: You don't like Apple's closed market because they can define arbitrary rules that makes it hard to compete. How is that any different than a Government defining arbitrary rules on the national marketplace?
Hopefully university CS courses will stop utilizing Visual Studio now.
Asterisk adds support for WebRTC/RTCWeb
Apple has a history of copying some apps, i.e. Instapaper etc, but they don't have a history of removing them afterwards. There could be plenty of perfectly reasonable reasons for this. I'd wait until actually finding out why before accusing them of anticompetitive behavior.
The HN algorithm is outlined here: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574
Patents/FRAND pools are just a way for big old companies tax the little guys, not for inovations, but by making an standard encumbered with patents. Completely the the opposite of what patents where supposed to do. So, in a way, FRAND is actually a abuse of the patent system in more ways than not.

Because of FRAND you already have products that do not exist and products that become significantly more expensive.
FDA approves first A.D.D. inducing drug to assist with Internet adaption
There are two blockers:

https://github.com/ozten/TLD.js/issues/23

https://github.com/ozten/TLD.js/issues/8

This isn't viable for submission as a Kickstarter w/o resolving those issues.

As @jensnockert and @LaRakei have pointed out here.

Creative solution? Please comment on the issues :)
This is extremely stupid to start a post with "This is extremely stupid". It adds no value and is simply offensive. Only extremely stupid people write that way.
The form is linked to multiple times in the same FAQ. If you want the DMCA requirements, you can find them here:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#c_3

edit: I'm not exactly sure what you're asking with "legally enforceable", but again, if you mean in terms of the DMCA, my understanding is that if a notification satisfies those requirements, you must comply. That's why the counter-notification process is so important.
"Repeal perjury laws!" - koeselitz
I don't know about the enforcement/evidence, but the end of the original link sheds some light, sounds like they have a pretty mature process for trying to handle illegitimate requests:

> we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests.... [examples of bad requests]... We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our Webmaster Tools when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.
This

But maybe the .NET SDK keeps being free.

It's a real pity, but well, Visual Studio didn't have a Express version "back then" before the .NET days (think Visual Studio 6)

This may very well be another reason not to use Windows
A possible solution would be sandbox[1], but it requires SELinux which is unavailable under Ubuntu (Ubuntu uses AppArmor).

[1] http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/28545.html
Bolt | Peters joins Facebook
“Apologies to Hans Christian Anderson” — with the whole TED PR thing just starting to cool down, I found this typo actually quite charming. The surname is spelt “Andersen”. :)

EDIT: I wonder, did you write this with anyone in mind or is it a patter you're seeing everywhere? I sure see this kind of nonsense as a plausible scenario in many big-name companies, and I see it in the company I currently work at, though it's dealt with and hopefully will be over soon.
> Before they determine who stole their music, they should figure out who stole their stylesheet.

What's wrong with the current style?
I said earlier today [1] that mobile proposes a strategic risk to Facebook as they don't control the mobile platform like Apple or Google.

This is really the best they can do to change that. I believe they're attempting to create a base mobile experience and use that as a selling point for mobile devices. On iOS for example there are standard apps for Mail, Maps, Search (browser), etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you see a suite of apps from Facebook to be the base functionality for some phone.

The next logical step would be to then bundle that on something and call it a Facebook Phone as a branding exercise. Carriers can bundle software, on non-IOS anyway, why not Facebook?

Mozilla ends money through the selling the default search engine on Firefox. Why can't Facebook do the same thing?

Part of this mobile strategy is to create a mobile platform (aka Project Spartan [2]).

Good for Facebook. At least they realize the risk they face.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4016950

[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/28/this-sure-looks-a-lot-like-...
Very cool. You could also do:

<script src="http://jquery.js/latest"></script>

And keep / as an informative website.
I'd rate that as highly unlikely. Microsoft's DreamSpark initiative makes this software free for many schools.

https://www.dreamspark.com/
The more I learn about markets the more comfortable I am with my decision to primarily invest in index tracking ETFs (e.g. SPY). If I want to 'gamble', i'll do something more elaborate like short volatility, but 90% of my capital is deployed following the market's movement, not trying to beat it.
OK, so if your wife says to you, e.g., "Swannie, we need [description of rarely purchased, high priced product]. The old one has stopped working." Do you check the front of the fridge, your kitchem notice board, the shoebox and then your photo album to find the contact information for who sells [product description]? Maybe you have the name of who to contact in one of those places? Or you need to call your friend to get a recommendation? Anything is possible, but what do you think is what people do _most of the time_?

FB is the next Pets.com

But it's going to be a slow, painful decline. They have raised billions to stay alive.

Solution for FB: Build a search engine and put it where the display ads are. Keep people inside the walled garden by removing any possible reason for them to leave. Like 1990's "framing" reborn. FAIL.

The whole notion of FB is utterly absurd. Tell us who all your friends are and we'll "enable" you to communicate with them (even though it's trivial to do yourself without us). We reserve the right to analyse all the information you give us and monitor everything you do on the FB site and elsewhere on the web to _try_ to make money, in various sneaky, deceptive (but really clever!) ways. FAIL.
It's also great that pv supports rate limiting, so you can choose if you want to saturate your network when you use it with netcat.
The fact that there is no reason given to the app developer for the rejection is a separate and bigger(IMO) problem here.

>I can't wait for the official explanation

Is there a guarantee of one? If the issue becomes a PR nightmare, maybe. Gruber would call this "Measure twice, cut once" and a good move by Apple.
...and home prices will continue to go up for another 30 years (and the 30 years after that). Of course there will be recessions (and likely even depressions) during those times. What's your point?

I think you're missing something here. Nobody is talking about picking actively managed mutual funds (which you're right, are a total gamble/ripoff). The Vanguard fund mentioned above is an index fund. It's not at all crazy to assume that by picking the world's biggest index fund, you are going to get 5% over inflation over 30 years.
I agree with Ars that the VisualStudio changes are bad, but is there any confirmation that the SDK change isn't temporary/won't have an official solution by the time of shipping? Microsoft has distributed the C++ compiler for years; it'd be very odd for them to do an about-face now. This reminds me off the uproar when Xcode 4 was suddenly a $5 purchase...except that it wasn't for users on the newer OS, when it actually shipped.
Most popular browser missing (Chrome)...
So the fix for this then is to start our own country. I hear there's some unclaimed land in Africa which would do nicely - http://www.neatorama.com/2010/02/05/earths-last-frontier-the...
What's with the Android FUD? Care to back up your assertion that Android is inherently less secure than say, iOS?
So when we say "developers", we mean "web content developers", and when we say things like "the expectation is that WHATWG (or whatever) will prioritize the needs of developers over everything else", we're saying "we expect the browser vendors to take dictation from the content developers"? And we think that's reasonable?
You may want to be careful who you sick the DoJ on, the less they do in tech, the better.

Additionally, Apple is far from a monopoly. The App store is where everyone wants to be so it can seem that way, but it's not.
Good luck with that if you're American. Thanks to the new IRS regs, a lot of foreign banks won't do business with Americans.

http://www.accountingtoday.com/debits_credits/Taxpayers-Stra...
> Windows on the desktop and Android on mobile shows us how spyware and viruses are a very big problem without those restrictions, compared to, say iOS.

But then, OSX and Linux don't have quite as many spyware and viruses, so the lack of restrictions is NOT the problem.

(yes, OSX has recently seen a surge in malware - the vast majority of it predicated on exploiting Java. Java might be a problem. Lack of restrictions isn't)
Why is Microsoft so hell-bent on destroying the desktop OS that made them what they are today? The Metro stuff is fine for tablets, but it's a TERRIBLE user experience on a traditional desktop computer.

I don't even understand this "everything must be a super simple little app" approach that both Apple and (and now because they're a big copy cat) Microsoft are taking. Is this really what the populace wants? I understand that constraints often yield the best designs, but this is a little crazy.

And as far as the dev tooling - that was one area that Microsoft was notably competent. I really can't see how this will benefit them in the long term. Seriously, what is the upside for them? A few more Metro apps? They'll win the battle but lose the war.
What's the larger strategy here: "Lose"?

I don't understand why they would do this. Seems like people will just shrug and migrate towards the free tools that will help them solve a variety of problems in more interesting ways (e.g. gcc, python, ruby, JS, etc.). Then they'll start migrating towards platforms that make it easy to create those solutions (Linux, OSX).
Dataland: MIT's '70s media room concept that influenced the Mac
Back to Java it is... On the other hand many universities have free access to Visual Studio Professional through MSDN-esque licensing programs.
Even if you somehow convinced the major browser projects to adopt this hack. There are many, many, many more users of DNS than just "browsers". Email, ssh, ftp, database clients, all other network daemon's, every programming language's network lib, many command line tools. Etc, etc.
Nitpick: It's not that they're eliminating the "travel middleman" but that they're removing removing unnecessary layers and being a better "middleman" by lowering costs for the consumer.
For those just reading the headline and not the article, it is important to note that Visual Studio 2010 Express will continue to be available for free. (But it won't take advantage of changes to the compiler or the environment.)
Clojure-Py: thinking about PyPy
I'm building an app that will have a lot of user generated content. How much should I worry about implementing something similar to this on our system before going on air? This sounds extremely cumbersome and expensive to operate. I don't think we could afford this initially.

Should we only bother with it after it becomes a problem (hopefully by then we'll have enough revenue to afford this)? Or is it too risky to launch without such system and get brought down ourselves?
Wouldn't it be useful to use arbitrary strings as domain pointers? This would be accomplished by buying the hash of your domain name. For example "hacker news" would be "b6fba500be5be229d95a9f5e2157be0763a63e0f.com"

How is that different? We already have nearly-arbitrary strings as identifiers. And "Hacker News" is taken several times over http://www.hackernews.com/ and http://thehackernews.com/
> If enough people are dissatisfied with the quality, they'll turn to new business, and the monopoly will cease to exist.

Wish it were so simple, but the problem is the ecosystem. A new business will not start out with 500K apps and developers won't develop apps till a platform has a lot of users, a chicken-and-egg problem. Users don't like buying devices with only a few apps available. Looks at WebOS, it was a good platform but died.

This is not even mentioning the real costs of switching, like not having access to already purchased apps and content because they're locked down(music, movie, ebook purchases).

It was a big problem with Windows in the 90s, you had to get a Windows computer to run software needed to be compatible with others.
It seems Microsoft only has one reliable tactical move: leverage the installed base of Windows users. They always fall back on this strategy whenever they want to prop up some other product.

For developers, they often provided carrots to encourage them in a certain direction. This tended to work sort of well, as there are always large numbers of new CS students expecting the Microsoft-recommended stack to provide a reliable career ticket. Maybe after they saw what Microsoft just did to Silverlight developers and they're not so eager to follow that path.

I never thought that they'd go so far as to actually take the stick to native Win32 developers. How can they not realize how much of their app ecosystem is still built on native code and how much easier it is to get started with that type of development on other platforms?

(In every one of these forums one or two people pop up to say how great this will be for developers and you can still use the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition to write native code or managed code to write C++. This is not correct, that product is crippleware and the managed code stuff is not anything like native C++.)
Microsoft still gives away the compilers, SDKs, .NET Runtime/SDKs, no?

Is the expectation that an IDE as powerful as Visual Studio be given away for free? Or just that the Windows Store not charge a fee for utilizing their distribution infrastructure?

There was a time before Express editions.

edit: I failed to scroll through the rest of the article, feel free to ignore me. I would delete but I don't like stranding replies. Apologies.
One of the examples I gave, Skyhook, so clearly contradicts your entire post that I have to assume you're intentionally lying. Because that was exactly google preventing someone from executing their business essentially via blackmail. See also their negotiations with Yelp / scraping their results. Oh, and twitter results.

So all in all, bullshit.
Cancer Killing Drug (without the side effects)
I think the point is the wrong way around.

1. The amateurs tools are a low quality, oversimplified version of the professional's. The same goes if you compare a Korg Trinity to a cheap Casio keyboard (I've owned the earlier of the two for 16 years and play for 2 hours a day at random intervals if that's any help supporting the difference in quality).

2. The machine is definitely suboptimal. I suggest that you read the remainder of the author's blog about sane computing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198572

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567186
I get everything for free.. Server software, IDE, ... and I feel dirtier, and dirtier every time!
If you read the article, you will find that MS is currently declining to ship compilers as part of the Windows 8 SDK, which is why Ars is so concerned. But I'd also point out that Visual Studio Express 2010 is indeed free, and far more flexible than its 2011 replacement. This represents a massive policy shift.
> tell Apple that this has to change.

They've already ignored everyone else who has said this. What are you going to use to force them? Threaten to take your apps to the other iOS appstore? There isn't one. Threaten to not write apps at all? There's a pile of devs a little more starving than you, waiting in line to replace you.
What a fascinating window into this hidden yet enormous neverending game of whack-a-mole.

I was initially surprised that Microsoft dwarfs the RIAA in requests, but of course their software sells at much higher prices than albums. I wonder how popular an artist has to be for the RIAA to consider it worth paying someone to find links and submit requests...

It also sounds like an enormous burden (read: barrier to entry) for search engines. I'm sure Google is constantly optimizing just how much of the process it can automate. (ex. If a submitter has had X requests approved for Y domain, remove it automatically?) I love how they let webmasters know about it, though, to remove fears of false positives.
I'm not proposing that you be at work every day either. I'm proposing you spend an extra 5 years after you exit the rat race (earlier than you would here) to secure a 7 figure sum and a series of passive income streams to ensure absolute financial freedom, and defer your "do whatever you want phase" by a few, but not many, years.

So, the timeline goes from this:

- Phase 1 (years 1-5) : Save $500k

- Phase 2 (years 5-30): Live frugally but without working for 25 years but without true financial freedom while interest accrues

- Phase 3 (year 30): Reach true financial security after you build wealth via the markets somehow (risky) and no longer worry about money whatsoever. You are now old and your liklihood of getting here by building wealth via the markets is probably lower than you think.

Alternate reality:

- Phase 1 (year 1-2): Save aggressively $200k by living like a bum.

- Phase 2: (years 3-8): With your independence, start a series of high growth ventures (some of which will fail) and work incredibly hard to build wealth. By year 5 you should be cash flow positive, by year 8 you should have $1-5m.

- Phase 3: (years 9-15): You are completely financially secure with a passive risk free income on interest of $150k-250k/yr on your cash sum. This is time for you to decide if your dreams require more passive income than that. If so, spend this time continuing to work independently and building wealth. If not, you're retired here and can do what you please on your 6-figure risk free salary.

- Phase 4 (optional): Get to $10m-20m in the bank. Congratulations you now have $500k-1m a year to play with and literally do whatever you want if your dreams so require it.
It would be most useful for the browser, so it makes sense to start there first. It wouldn't have adverse effects on existing infrastructure, so I don't see why other components couldn't wait.
I don't think that really follows well from the claim above. If they wanted an iPhone they could get an iPhone 4. Getting a Bionic or Razr instead is user choice.
Especially since now the root zone file is just gonna grow and grow with new TLDs.
> Apple of the 2010s is much more deserving of DoJ investigation than 1990s Microsoft ever was.

Not only that. Google, Twitter, Facebook et al are in the same situation. I am always arguing that with Microsoft you can reverse engineer their software. No more support for DOS? you can find a way to have a working application. You can't reverse engineer the cloud.
I think you and by proxy Alan Kay nailed it there.

As a person who purchases items for need and function, not form, desire or promise [1], I get to see the distinction daily.

[1] all my current worldly posessions together cost 50% less than a new low-end MacBook Pro (bar one item - a musical instrument).
Google and Oracle's Java clash must be resolved
>I view mobile as more of a game console than a PC, but if Apple wants to insist that they're fully functional and "post-PC", they have to live by the same standards.

Apple does not insist the post-PC devices are fully functional. In fact, Jobs compared PCs to trucks and iOS devices to cars. By post-PC they imply that lockdown that comes with it.
You can even drop the http: part, like this:

<script src="//jquery.js/latest"></script>
Dude reverse-engineers Airport Express - steals secret encryption key from ROM. Other dudes use this illegal acquired key to make an app that replicates the function of the original device & submit that to the AppStore of exact that vendor of the device. Somehow it gets thru, now they yank it & anyone really wonders about it?
Getting a TLD up and running would cost a LOT more than $200k - you have to create a SRS registrar, billing, email systems, security, Who Is, etc.

You may be able to subcontract these to SrsPlus (like I do) or OpenSRS, but you would still have to go through $50k bond and testing.

I have been thinking of this for quite some time and have some great ideas of how a dot JS should work. Please contact me Ric @ my account dot org
> People tend to conveniently forget that it's the consumers in an economy who define a monopoly. There's nothing inherently wrong with it.

Yes there are issues with monopolies. This is why new laws must be created to protect against these monopolies.
Only a fool would base their development environment on the hope that an outdated compiler version will still be downloadable from Microsoft's website into the future.

That thing is crippleware anyway, it can't even produce native 64-bit executables. Raise your hand if you're still on a 32-bit operating system.
Nice - that'll spice up my rather boring svnadmin dump sessions - thanks for posting!
You honestly think this is worse than what we've seen from Apple, Nokia, Samsung and Oracle? Seems pretty par for the course to me. Why single out one bad actor for what is clearly an endemic problem?
Ready to try ARM on the cloud? Try it on EC2 with Ubuntu 12.04
"the expectation is that WHATWG (or whatever) will prioritize the needs of developers over everything else"

Nope, not saying that at all.

"we expect the browser vendors to take dictation from the content developers"

Dictation no, participation yes.

And that is reasonable.
Nah, too much typing. Maybe if you got rid of jquery.com. It's not even a company!
I'd definitely consider it. It's by the man who invested the concept of TDD and the xUnit framework after all :-)

My experience is that people tend to split into two camps.

One group prefers Kent's book - which is kind of like the K&R of TDD. It's thin and very to the point, but needs a bit of work from the reader to get the best out of it. The examples are deliberately simple to express the concepts clearly.

The other prefers David Astel 's "Test-driven Development: A Practical Guide". It's a bit more grounded in real world examples, which some folk seem to find an easier way to get a grip on the concepts.

Another thing to bear in mind that they both talk about "old" versions of JUnit - before they rebuilt it based on attributes - so you're probably going to want to look at something that covers the latest JUnit or TestNG or something (I'm not a Java hacker by trade - so can't really comment on what the best testing environment is there these days).
There are so many more variations in a hash. Hashes are case sensitive to their original input. "Hacker News" would be different from "hacker news", different from "hackernews." The scarcity disappears.

You can also use entire documents as pointers to domains, something you can't do with the existing system.