skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't compare this with the PlayBook, but it was clear that the device is NOT ready.

Our Deputy Editor was at the event and he described it as the most "controlled demo experience"[1] he's ever had -- and Chris has been at this since the late 1990s. That didn't surprise me at all because any time you spend most of your presentation talking about the engineering of the Touch Cover (which does look incredible) and not the apps, the battery life or the timeline, it's not ready.

I think this has potential -- especially at the Surface running Windows Pro level -- but it was curious to see them announce it SO early, when it's clear the device isn't ready in any way.

My gut tells me that the RT version will start at $500 and the Pro version will start at $1000. Knowing Microsoft, I've got to think they are aggressively aiming for a November release date for the first version and a February or March for the Pro. I don't think it's likely it will appear before then.

My bigger question is what specific APIs are they going to unveil to Windows 8 developers that take advantage of the Surface devices -- and will there be Surface-specific apps that won't work with the other Windows 8 tablets. As I wrote late last night, I expect that within a year of this thing's release, we won't see any other consumer-facing Windows 8 tablets on the market.

That to me is actually the most interesting part of this whole thing. Microsoft has taken Apple's approach to fully integrating the hardware (I don't think this is their version of the Nexus line of devices...I think they've created what they want to be THE Windows 8 tablet experience, not simply a flagship example).

[1]: http://mashable.com/2012/06/18/hands-on-with-microsofts-tabl...
That's a cool idea but I wonder if this is too complicated for the average beginner? I did COmsci in school but I did not easily understand how the DOM and xmlhttp API related...I was a perfect example of the programmer who Crockford says is wrong for hating JS because all we did was run to jQuery (and he's right)

I can't imagine how frustrating it is for a total beginner to understand the mechanisms, even if they are web desires with some experience with the DOM.

The good thing about teaching a language like Ruby or Python is that you don't have to build a webpage. In fact, most people are very content with not publishing on the web...and so they are reluctant to study JS because they think it's only for web development.

But with Ruby, you could write something that sucks in Craigslist results and reformat it so that you don't have to click through to see the pics...and then store it as a local file that is written to every 5 hours...I did this plenty of time when doing a furniture search...

I know you can hack Google tables/fusion to do some of this, but that's a whole new layer of things to learn...whereas everyone gets basic text files existing on the HD
If the Palm Computing IPO didn't reflect marketing hysteria around PDA's, I don't know what does. The spinoff gave Palm a market cap of over $20B, about six times the entire value of its parent company, 3Com.
I don't doubt the NSA is spying. I think making the assertion without documentation that Google et al. have huge teams of people dedicated to helping them spy is a bit beyond the pale.
We don't go read people's comments after they apply (that wouldn't scale well). It's more that if we see a username we recognize for saying smart things on HN, we're more likely to invite them to interviews.
China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days
The variable is also when they get this thing finished. They didn't allow anyone to have hands-on time with the unit and the keyboard and cover. Touch the keyboard cover. Touch the unit, no, you can't launch apps or use more than our sandboxed interface. No, you can't try typing on it.

It's not ready. At all. That's fine, I understand why they had to announce this now (even if it was a bit earlier than would be ideal), but Microsoft knows when it's releasing Windows 8 and the lack of a hard release date for Surface is totally unrelated.
Well, by saying you don't like Wolfe you are just stating a personal preference. The fact that you have found a very specific reason for your dislike doesn't any in way invalidate Wolfe's authorship or his readers as much as it further illuminates your own way of thinking.

In fact, in one sense your explanation is painfully ironic, as you seem to consider yourself morally superior to those readers who -- you claim -- read Wolfe for entirely superficial reasons. Are we really stooping so low now as to criticize people for their reading tastes or to second-guess their reasons for reading what they do?

Personally I derive as much pleasure from reading Wolfe as I do from Lem, although I would never compare them. And the key word is "pleasure": I, like I suppose most people, read books to enjoy them. I enjoy Wolfe for many reasons, but "moreal superiority" is not one of them. And I am wary of terms such as "literary significance" to guide my tastes; that's a term for scholars and academics to worry about, as a reader I am concerned with books and stories that affect me emotionally and stimulate me intellectually.

I see your point about Wolfe's complexity being more of a device and less about genuine depth. Despite this, I do enjoy the richness it imparts on the narrative. Wolfe's template is Borges, who uses similar devices and whose stories often have a sort of insular quality where the narrative only exists to create a clever gadget whose cleverness can be admired, but cannot be applied to anything outside itself. For example, Borges has a neat story, The House of Asterion, about a lonely person who roams a large house with many corridors; at the end of the story is killed, and we realize that he's the minotaur in the myth about Theseus.

As for The New Sun, I think that Severian's unreliability is more a ruse (or at best evidence of a flawed character) than an important plot point -- compare this to his Latro trilogy, set in ancient Greece, where the main character, having suffered brain damage, is unable to form new memories, and is therefore genuinely unreliable. The Short Sun also has a character who loses his sense of identity when his mind is merged with another's, and his lack of reliability comes from an inability or refusal to recognize who he actually is.

(Incidentally, while I admire The New Sun greatly, I found its two loose sequels, The Long Sun and The Short Sun, to be much more emotionally stimulating. It helps that the main characters are not borderline sociopaths. They are also less prone to the kind of cryptic connections that are evident in the first book.)
Perhaps this will catch on more than LevelUp!
I can confirm, if you don't you will receive angry emails.
You are equating spending towards merely manufacturing PV arrays and wind plants with spending on R&D, that is not the same thing. Apollo isn't even a remotely comparable program because that was the creation of new technologies. The comparable program here would be the interstate highway system, perhaps.
Mercury crater mysteriously resembles Mickey Mouse - CSMonitor.com
The difference is that the author is implicitly assuming that you've got a business that requires your active involvement to keep going.

If the business requires 0 energy from you, and makes money, then his point becomes much less relevant. But most of the businesses in question are not like that. You have paperwork to keep them going, decisions to make, customers to serve...
Yes. It seems this falls under "deemed export" concept, where controlled technology is "deemed" to be exported just by a foreign national having contact with it.

http://www.ailf.org/lac/pa/lac_pa_071703.pdf

"Once such information is released to a foreign national, it is deemed to have been exported to that person’s country of nationality. Under both the EAR and the ITAR, the deemed export rule applies to technology (and, in some cases, software) transfers to a foreign national, if the technology (or software) to which the foreign national is exposed relates to the development, production, disposal, or use of items controlled under either the EAR or the ITAR. "

Now, whether this applies to ipads and iphones, I have no idea.
Is anyone thinking this will turn into a Zune 2.0? I'm not sure why everyone is so optimistic since when MS tried to copy the iPod we got a brown Zune.
Officially, maybe. Looking at the site, it's quite clearly branded "Surface". Not having the final retail packaging, it's just a guess what the final retail name will be.

The Samsung Galaxy is officially named the Samsung I9000, but the retail packaging shows a more user-friendly name.
As they should!

http://howilearnedeverything.com/2011/10/30/clearing-the-air...
Apple likely not shaking in its boots over Microsoft Surface tablet
> In terms of profit - I think MS will price the hardware as low as they can, to fight off Apple. Their profit will come elsewhere

From where? They do not have a successful media store and they are bundling Office. Aside from Windows and Office, the only things they sell at profit are from 'Server and Tools'.

Internet and Devices/entertainment have been money-sinks. The idea they will start turning Apple/Google-sized profits is wishful thinking
Another key point is that temporary tables are horrible for concurrency. Obviously only one session can access them, but more importantly, they end up causing a great deal of disk activity. At the end of every session, the table is physically dropped. In ext3, this can take quite a while for large tables (not so bad in filesystems like xfs). It also can cause substantial stalls in InnoDB as the buffer pool is scanned for matching pages and are flushed out. Percona Server has innodb_lazy_drop_table to mitigate this issue to some degree, but dropping tables is still always an expensive operation. This is mostly a concern for OLTP, not necessarily OLAP servers.
Introduction of Exception Handling in Java
Google and Antitrust naysayers deliver usual responses to FTC and EU Commission
How many times will this be submitted?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123480

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124097

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124645

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4125890

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126185

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126272

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132025

... and it's likely I've missed some.
Voeding: artisjokken voor een gezonde lever en gal | Leef Nu Gezonder
My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it.

The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.
Explains 90% of what is taught in college nowadays.
And the Zune was a great hardware/software combo, with unfortunate timing. The iPhone went onto the market soon after launch and no one wanted a PMP anymore. On the flip side, when Microsoft tried to copy the Playstation, we got the Xbox. Seems to be doing pretty well.

Are you really arguing color, though? It's a black tablet with a handful of color choices for the cover/keyboard. Brown Zune has no bearing on this.
Why would there be Surface-only apps? It just runs Windows RT/8. And why would there not be any other Windows 8 tablets?
>> "why dont they check that at the airport when people are actually leaving the US ?"

Do you really want TSA going through your luggage, carry on and checked, when you fly? That would add an incredible amount of time to check in.
It's similar to how Apple takes most of the flack for human rights violations at Foxconn when many other companies (including Acer, Intel, HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, etc) have their products manufactured by Foxconn as well.
This is true, only if you compare every android tablet across manufacturers. People who like to tout android vs apple love to do this. But the fact is, android tablets have not been a success for a single manufacturer. There's only so long companies will keep dumping money down this rabbit hole hoping to get lucky.

Android tablets have been a success for Google. for everyone else, not so much.
Infocaptor interview
Basically: "We only care about keeping a checkbox next to 'linux support' in our feature grid. We don't care about how shitty the experience is for linux users"

It is refreshingly blunt, i'll give them that.
On Sprint it does
True but irrelevant, and potentially inflammatory.
Sure. It's his blog. Providing you with hard evidence to drive your product design process isn't his job. It's yours.
Assange seeks asylum at Ecuador embassy
Custom themes in Gmail
Microsoft might know when they're releasing Windows 8, but I don't. Do you? All that I've seen from MS is "RTM is planned for late July". Windows 8 isn't finished.

With that in mind, how do you know they don't know when Surface will be released? Just because they didn't announce it?
I'll take nVidia over ATI for a Linux box anyday, the driver difference is night and day.
DRY Tests with Nested Relationships in Factory Girl
How to use FactoryGirl gem to make your tests more DRY and less brittle with long setup methods.
Do you use resharper? I had a nasty issue with something involving resharper and/or mercurial and/or my SSD where it would take 10 seconds to change documents and literally 10 minutes to close after a day's work. I re-cloned my project, started working out of the new repo and it was snappy again. Went from 10 minutes to close VS to about 5 seconds.
I completely agree. There are two important points here. First, they don't currently know the answer to the question, so they would have to figure it out, probably by examining a bunch of the conversations to identify who is and who is not a US Citizen. That examination would mean violating the privacy of US Citizens. (Collection does not equal examination.) Second, the wording in the article is a bit misleading. The article says that the NSA "won't" give this information to the Senators. Technically, that is true, but it would probably be more accurate (and less inflammatory) to say that they "can't" provide the information. Won't and Can't imply very different intentions. I'm not saying it is right/acceptable that this info is not known, just saying that the way the article is written is a bit misleading.
Security vulnerabilities – the coordinated disclosure sausage mill
Working with Graphics on the Web: Canvas vs. SVG
"If Linus would get off his high horse about closed source drivers"

... then he would be Microsoft and Apple, and not an Open Source operating system developer, maintainer, producer, and evangelist. All his years of working openly and freely will be squandered and his life's work beholden to closed-source, closed spec device manufacturers.
I said "that they build" quite intentionally. Yes, the third-party PowerVR-based chipsets have little to no Linux support, a problem going back to the original GMA500 (Poulsbo) chipset, and that makes it difficult to make a blanket statement that all Intel graphics chipsets work with Linux. I'd still argue that Intel has the best Linux support among graphics card vendors; on top of that, Intel drives the majority of new innovations in the X and Linux graphics infrastructure code.
It's racist to jump to the conclusion that someone speaking the language of Iran might be Iranian? I'd say that's a reasonable (if incorrect) assumption to make.
Isn't this already the case? Who has authority for communication infrastructure within a country if not the government of that country?

Basically. A lot of people have been pretending that the Internet (even the part inside your country) is exempt from all laws... because it's the Internet.
The equal protection clause of the US constitution:

no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Also the due process clause:

[N]or shall any person . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law .

It does not differentiate between citizens and none-citizens.
True, my concern is more that people will just stop with the CRUD app.

Geocities did some good for letting people having their own page. But the HTML was horrendous, and left many thinking they're doing amazing stuff. I don't really want to see that repeated.

The problem, however, is at the developer level and not the tool level, I suppose.
"I agree with Mark Zuckerberg that most of us will only have one really good business idea in our lives."

I think the founders of Microsoft, Dropbox, Zynga, and many, many others would disagree. Even if we do on average only have one good business idea in our lives, it probably won't be the first one you work on.

The author uses Twitter as an example, which was actually a spinoff of Evan Williams' second company.. he'd already had one great idea, Blogger, which was sold to Google.
Nanoparticles could help treat resistant form of cancer
That has not been my experience at all. SBT has always worked correctly for me.

When was the last time you used Scala and/or SBT? I know a lot of the tools in the Scala ecosystem were unstable prior to Scala 2.8. However, now they have become pretty good. Even the, previously notoriously bad, Eclipse plugin has become good.
I disagree. Forbes takes plenty of shots at Wall Street, the bailouts, Bank of America, Jamie Dimon, Ben Bernanke, The Fed, Fannie & Freddie, and so on. They spent years ripping on Lehman and Bear Stearns.

Besides, tech is worth more than finance, there's a lot more profit there than in banking. The next Google or Facebook will probably be worth more than our largest banks.

Apple + Microsoft in 2012 ($70b in profit) = Goldman + Bank of America + Citi + Wells Fargo + JP Morgan + PNC + BB&T + Morgan Stanley + Blackrock etc.
The interesting part about Detroit, amongst others, is that Detroit's "ruins" are due to an exodus of industry and followed by population. That's to say, it's not exactly due to gov't mismanagement or some kind of systemic failure. The failure is more individual --for example, company goes bankrupt --leaves building. But no one comes in to rent the building out. In other cases, it's due to buildings reaching their useful life --and not getting torn down properly (in this case, too costly for the gov't since no one is willing to build, as they would in other cities). All this is aggravated by the flight form the city to the suburbs and elsewhere. To put it succinctly, this is more organic, than artificial.

So, for example, you could be in a nice building and look across the street and look at a dilapidated building in disrepair. It's a weird juxtaposition but one shaped by economics and demographics.
Compared to the anti-MS sentiment thats oozing out of these comments?
Just as a point of reference, this building will be taller than both of the fallen WTC buildings stacked on top each another (sans the spire).
You know, not long ago I took somebody's "how well do you know C?" quizzes, and it was fully of this sort of question -- what C does with overflows and underflows in various circumstances. And I must admit, I felt like I had been asked what happens, exactly and specifically, to a particular piece of memory after dividing by zero. "I don't know, I try to avoid doing that!"

I don't know. I can admire the analysis, but I don't understand the motive. Do people really write code that relies on this sort of behavior? Or is it just trivia for trivia's sake?
Sorry, it was a very weird request.

We seriously need a social protocol for situations where A says something which makes B feel very sorry, but the proper recipients of B's apology are no longer available to hear it. It felt way too cheesy to just apologize to myself, so I apologized to you, but that doesn't make me feel any better about my womanizing and discriminatory past. Live and learn, I guess.
General Assembly Expands In New York, Has Sights Set On Educating The World
I love it when Venture Capitalists write articles with this claim since they prefer the idea that support from Venture Capitalists is the key to any successful business, not skills, talent, genius, a product, customers or a business plan.

A quick search and replace provides the basis for an alternative article called "Why Sand Hill Venture Capitalists Overestimate Their Own Smarts and Abilities":

> Venture Capitalists believe that they can recreate their successes again and again, start-up after start-up.

> In some ways, Sand Hill is set up to support this way of thinking. If you’re successful financing one company and you were the venture capitalist, you deserve all the money from all the engineers running other businesses in Silicon Valley to go start your next capital firm. After all, who are the engineers going to support? Some failed venture capitalists instead?

Makes as much sense.
> "Discrimination. Racially profiled. He didn't have any business asking me what country I was from"

Actually, if it would be illegal to sell the technology to an Iranian, and you're speaking the official language of Iran, then it would make a lot of sense for them to ask you if you're an Iranian citizen. Clearly the manager misunderstood and misapplied the policy, but this is not "racial profiling". It's linguistic profiling, and it's the only reasonable way to enforce the export law.
I had a laptop hard lock in the middle of a talk once. That was fun. For the record, I handled it by immediately swapping out my laptop for the session runner's (can't risk it happening 2x during the talk), my slides were online and I just re-downloaded them and tried to go forward losing as little time as possible.
This issue definitely isn't unique to Codecademy. I spent way too much time figuring out the exact combination of whitespace that would satisfy CodeEval. I suppose finding the right set of fine-grain test cases remains a problem. Perhaps they should start using QuickCheck or some other random testing + test case distribution combinator system (if they aren't already). Those can systematically build up from small base cases to odd corner cases.
> Imagine if the US Army wouldn't divulge the capabilities of a new fighter jet to the very people who were authorizing the money for its construction.

No need to imagine. This happens. Covert areas of defense spending have always been conducted in the dark, often with blank checks.

The military, NSA, CIA, etc. are in the game of accumulating hidden capabilities. This is the job the American people have given them, and yes, it is a constant arbitrage at odds with, among other things, their own privacy and fiscal responsibilities.

A fascinating read on this topic, regardless of accuracy: http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/030738...