skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
/standard rant about the Y-axis not being anchored at zero, which will cause most people to be mislead.

UPDATE: here's an illustration. compare this: http://i.imgur.com/f3m25.png to this: http://i.imgur.com/6z2cS.png (those two graphs represent the same data)
GitHub notifications by audible commit messages, texts, and emails
This could well be the most deluded comment I've seen yet on HN. And I am going to take a guess that you are either (a) not a developer or (b) have never made an app.

Because those that have understand that you do not put in the hundreds and hundreds of hours for nothing. You don't do out of some misguided dedication to Steve Jobs, Apple or because you want to be cool.

You do it because you have a family to feed, want to make some extra money (iOS is far more profitable) or just make people happy (iOS users are far less likely to pirate).
Well that's good to know. All this time, I've always been super cautious with my MSDN keys figuring Microsoft keeps a tight eye on activations and whatnot. Stuff like not activating a machine because I might reinstall it within the grace period. Good to know I don't have to worry.
Building Really Big Applications With Kendo UI
Using Maven to Integrate Flyway
It's pretty good, but it's a bit cold, impersonal and corporate. Almost alienating. It has a masculine minimalist bent that reminds me of hard stone floors, benches and the alienation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Or in plain "Engrish" they all say: "All your bit are belong to us."
It's interesting to see that they had similar issues 2 weeks ago (power outage) and it looks like nothing was done in those 2 weeks to address the issue, since it happened again this week-end.
Agreed. I don't get why people like it so much. Something must be wrong with it to only have so few users -- it has been around for more than two years now, I think.
I find it fascinating that most people forget Enron famously adopted the stack ranking principles. Look how that worked out for them.
Exactly. Which leads to some of the most awful and crazy designs decisions.

Look at the upgrade to 64 bit. In Windows 16 bit days you had the C:\Windows\System directory. In Windows 32 bit, you gained C:\Windows\System32 for your system libraries. In Windows 64 bit you would assume C:\Windows\System64 right? Nope. 64 bit dlls go in to System32 and 32bit dlls go into SysWOW64. WTF?

Same goes with Program Files (32 bit) etc. They are pretty much screwed by legacy.

The windows mobile, XBox, and WinRT guys must feel so much better than having to work on Windows core because they don't have to deal with supporting 17+ years of software still running on their platform.
Nokia could be a litigation nightmare for Google’s Asian Android partners
In a large company, the technical documentation may be scrubbed by non-engineers.
A Database of Folly
Full Tilt Poker CEO arrested for $430 million Ponzi scheme
> While Google has the resources to support Opera, it's not financially prudent to dedicate them to support a browser that barely has any market share.

Really? How much do you think it costs to make Blogger work on Opera?
Researchers create "clickjack rootkit" for Android that hijacks apps
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean review
Apple wants money. Apple makes nice product I want to buy.

Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.

Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.

Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.

Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.

Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.

In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike
While that's true, it is also reliant on the fact that the manager of your immediate team be able to effectively argue for your team members during the stack-ranking meeting. If you happen to have a manager that ends up being too reticent, many of the underperforming scores could end up being disproportionately assigned to your team.
It is common knowledge in the german hacker scene. See the german wikipedia article for references and further links.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on the gut feeling vs. stats issue, but this complex algorithm in and of itself doesn't seem to reveal any information that isn't obvious from basic stats: Xavi is clearly seen as the "dynamo" from the basic stats perspective (in fact he routinely breaks passes received/made records). If one would come with a complex algorithm that would reveal something new (to me, to the media), that would be really exciting for me.

Since you seem to have an interest in such situations (complex techniques claiming discrepancy between consensus and actual performance), I'll go off on a tangent and shamelessly plug (again! don't people have any shame these days?) what I think is a very good example:
http://wagesofwins.com/wins-produced/how-to-calculate-wins-p...
http://wagesofwins.com/faq/
Single atom shadow
This is such nonsense.

You only have to take a look at the WWDC videos and the vast array of well documented APIs provided to know that Apple does care about developers and treats them.

So Apple doesn't have an open bug tracking system. Big deal. It's rare to see a company that does.
That did it. Only it kept my custom Google engine and added the old one back, which I had to make default.
That would be lovely, but as long as IE is as far behind as they are (and at work we don't even run on less than ie 9, which is still horrible) and, crucially, don't force their users to only use the newest version. That will never happen. The web will be limited to what works in modern browsers, regardless of standards, and IE, 2-3 versions back.
Why Google and Ubuntu don't say “Linux”
I'll even give you a hacker news discount if you email and setup a week asap. $25 off for anyone who mentions HN.
Spot on. I love the features and technology in my Android phone, but its a giant mess. I basically have to reboot it every few days to maintain functionality. The stuff that I have on it works decently, but I limit my apps to a music player, a ssh app, a vnc/rdesktop app and facebook. I am a much more conservative consumer of apps than most, and if I have to deal with this BS, I'm sure other users are constantly facepalming. If I were to make a scurrilous comparason, Google set out to make a Linux phone and ended up with a Windows 3.0 phone.

What I'm saying is - Apple, please make a phone with a real keyboard, don't make me use a MS phone.
A user base of 300,000,000 means they can't have less than 4.2% market share, even if the whole population of the earth were online.
Though I agree with your general point about Microsoft being hampered by legacy support (but for other reasons such as having 2 UI paradigms of Metro and Windows together), I don't think this is the best example. The everyday user really doesn't care what folder their software is installed to as long as its easily accessible from the desktop/programs.
Yeah, great work. Pretty impressive; how long did all that take you?

Pretty Apple inspired though; as someone said in the comments above maybe Microsoft does need to have separate public entities much like the way telecomms up here in Canada are doing (Koodo/Wind etc.)
I'm pretty sure that number includes opera mini / opera mobile users. I don't know what the numbers for opera desktop are but I'm certain they're a fraction of opera's mobile offerings.
I think the primary problem with QR codes is the whole dance you have to do to read them. I have to notice the QR code. Pull out my phone. Wake it up. Load the QR app. Point it at the QR code. Really you want to have QR codes automatically read by looking at then and stored in some sort of buffer until you give a crap or they expire.
Including testing, support, development, translation into various languages, overhead, meetings when fixes conflicts?

I would shoot at an average of 100k per feature. Plus more in the future to keep the support when they add new features.
I'm definitely not an econ expert (far from it). Scalpers may not be confusing demand. But aren't they're artificially constraining supply? There are a limited number of shows and seats available.

If I'm a scalper and I buy the last 100 seats (or rather, I have the last 100 seats not taken by someone who actually is going), I can now sell the tickets at a premium. If there are only 75 more fans that want to go, they are forced to come to me and the prices go up artificially. I can still profit without selling all the tickets. Without me the scalper, there would have been enough tickets to go around at face value.

Yes, the price is going up because people are willing to pay for it, but without the scalper it wouldn't have happened.
The SF Giants use a variable ticket pricing scheme that seems to be pretty successful. It adjusts the price of tickets based on projected demand. This probably does a pretty good job at eating into scalpers profits (although not entirely). Of course baseball ticket demand is a lot more predictable due to the fact that their are ~80 home games a season.

It would be interesting to see if there was any way to implement a similar system for concerts and shows.
Re: Correct Market Pricing

1-This is inherently a class-based argument. It assumes that someone with more money than you isn't a 'real fan' and that his true fans are the squeezed middle class (or whatever class-bracket you happen to be in).

2-The world doesn't owe you anything. Thinking this is unfair because you can't afford tickets to a stand-up comedy show is the epitome of a First-World problem.

edit: this isn't exactly a reply to sambe's comment. I was taking his 'Correct Market Pricing' comment that was addressed at the rebuttals and adding to it.
Meet the biohackers
Yeah, Google's reverse image search is unusable with Opera... unless you change the user agent string and tell Google you're using Firefox.

Then they whine about how Facebook and Apple are trying to destroy the open web.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not. Opera has been around for over fifteen years -- longer than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. It's been around as long as Internet Explorer. But their main revenue source is mobile, where they have been the #1 browser vendor for a long time. Opera accounts for over 20% of mobile browser page views worldwide. The desktop market is less of a focus for Opera than for other vendors.

Even so, while Opera accounts for only about 1% of desktop browser page views in the US, it's about 4% of desktop page views in Europe, and much much higher within certain countries (around 9% in Poland and 20% in Russia, for example). Market share depends highly on geography, and it's much harder for a global company to ignore any of the major browsers.

Desktop map: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201206-201206-...

Mobile map: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201206-...
Ask HN: How do you determine your own knowledge level?
I've been looking at the latest HN job listing and they always mention they are looking for experts. This got me thinking.

How do I know how smart I am? How do I know if I'm actually good at this? While I know I can do certain things here and there, I'm not really sure if this fits in the amateur level or the genius level.

I tried asking other people but that brought even greater questions. How do I know if the other person is an expert or not to gauge whether I'm an expert or not? Plus, finding people who are willing to fully evaluate you without any bias only adds to the problem. Most people also seem to evaluate based on output, not thought process. They can't really say if your heading the wrong or right direction.

What ways do you guys self-evaluate yourself to determine your own knowledge level? In what ways have you used others to help determine it?
This guy really has an axe to grind...he's also an idiot.
google is frankly starting to enrage me, they are seeming to become more and more a company with only one obvious goal - own the internet. They have made some good products ( the chrome developer tools are great ), but I'm sick of them just blowing over anyone or anything that stands in their seeming quest towards a complete monopoly ( the google books settlement is a good example ). What happen to the good ol days where google at least seemed open and supportive of the internet, its community, and innovation?
It's a great idea and still is. Linux does pretty much the same thing.

It actually broke because they didn't allow multiple versions and windows linked to the latest version at runtime.

They fixed all this with WinSXS which allows a PE file to specify a manifest i.e. a list of required versions of DLLs to load. This is all neatly explained here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx
> So true fans are poor?

No? True fans are alone, and true fans are not necessarily the earliest at the gate. If scalpers can grab half the tickets before the show's sold out by buying in bulk, they're going to make a lot of money. Because now they control the product.

> he needs to increase supply by touring more.

He's booked 67 dates, he's only one guy, touring more? He'll need to put his million of sales in cloning if he wants to do that.

But he's at least found a way to keep control on prices and scalping and give everybody equal opportunity.
I don't understand how the WWDC example nullifies my claim that developers fall below users, their own bottom line and carrier partners in priority for Apple.
Ouch; they've really taken something fun and made it a pain in the neck to use.

Getting a Technet or MSDN subscription used to be enjoyable since you just got freedom to test what you wanted when you wanted and on what machines (or VMs) you wanted.

Now every time you activate you will have to think "Is this installation worth an activation?" Because what the article fails to mention is that each key has an activation limit (so 3 * 10 = 30 total activations per product).

Even on my retail copy of Windows 7 Pro I constantly hit the activation limit and need to call them. Which you would know is damn annoying as you have to type in and type back like sixty digit strings of nonsense.

I thought activation was originally meant to stop pirates not harass paying customers? Where did Microsoft lose it's way?
I do say it as a bad thing. In my example, the 1000 fans and the artist would have been perfectly happy with the arrangement. Of course this is never the case.

So the scalpers are profiting from the mismatch in supply and demand and making the show less accessible to the fans. From a scalper POV, that's capitalism. God bless America. From the fans's POV, it just sucks.

And I could swap Louis CK for oil, and scalpers for Goldman Sachs, you know. Same thing IMO.
MICROSOFT: A PROMISE MADE, A PROMISE KEPT.
The post title is about big dreams. Jobs could have thought "Michael Jackson would be great to have but he's too big of a star and would never agree, so let's settle for Herbie Hancock instead". The outcome would have been exactly the same. Instead, Jobs wanted it to happen, and Mark didn't know any better so he tried to make it happen. And guess what... it would have happened, if only for the budget mismatch.

That in and of itself would be a nice historical story and no takeaway is required. However, if you insist on there being a takeaway, then try this one on for size: don't put artificial limits on what you think is possible. Move forward and make it happen as your assumptions about what is possible and what isn't are probably wrong.
As long as it's standards compliant, it shouldn't be too bad of an experience.
There are two parts to example: the plain functions, and the composition. CoffeeScript can make the plain functions look different, but the composition is the strangest looking; I need to find a better syntax for representing a directed graph in code, and CoffeeScript doesn't help with that part.
Suddenly I'm happy that I did a big technet download spree a while back for a bunch of older software. This also reminds me to request the rest of my keys and download the XML dump of them.
Machine Learning that Matters
Microsoft didn't get where it is by tweaking their marketing symbology. They got where they are by a lot of work by quite a few very smart programmers, some shrewd business moves, and a lot of luck.

I can look at new symbols all day, and it's not going to change my opinion of Microsoft or their products. Not one whit.

And not that it matters, but I think the slash is too stark, and, frankly, ugly. It might be liked in some boardroom, but it's not consumer friendly, and it's nothing like the touch-feely trend that is the metro interface.
>> revenue != profit

The comparison you cited is between revenue, and is a fair direct comparison.

But it is likely also true that iOS devices generate more profit than Microsoft's total revenue (this is an unfair comparison, biased in Microsoft's favor).

>> a dividend paying company's stock price looks different from that of one which is focused on accumulating cash

Both AAPL and MSFT have announced dividends (http://investor.apple.com/faq.cfm).
The big one - forking is far too slow.

Others - you can't use select(..) on files. Nasty file-locking model. No good remote filesystem solution out of the box (CIFS is slow and unstable) and the third party solutions are nasty. No native workspaces and the third party attempts are nasty. You can't reflect against the system API (all current mainstream OSs suffer from this). The API is particularly thick with legacy overhead.
Vendor prefixes are f***ing batshit crazy
The ToralFootball app, now StatsZone, allows you to do some analysis yourself. Not "raw" exactly.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/total-football-2010/id3755679...

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fourfourtwo-football-stats/id...

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/euro-2012-football-stats-zone...
Ticketmaster's exclusives on venues

Another problem, especially when a ticketing start up tries to go after a medium or large venue, is that Ticketmaster has the capital to give venues (some) of the money from the ticket sales before their sold (e.g. a few months or a year before). The venue then has money to do stuff before the event.

To compete against that, you need to have a lot of money in the bank (i.e. not a start up).
> The scalpers are the market-makers.

So what? They're not adding any value in the equation, they're just parasitically extracting wealth from all other entities. What's the point of that from a social perspective?
This is pretty spot on. The process of reviews is one of the most corrosive elements of working at Microsoft. However, there's more to the story. MS fumbled a huge opportunity in the way they reacted to the financial crisis and recession. They put the vast majority of promotions and bonuses on hold. Keep in mind that this is a company that has tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand. More so, this is a company with an "up or out" philosophy baked into it (and that's a big reason for the review system). Due to fear and lack of leadership the company saved spending who knows how many millions of dollars and in the process drove away a lot of their best talent and lost out on hiring a lot of new talent as well. The way they went about layoffs didn't help either, with lots of little layoffs instead of one big purge and done (so that the remaining folks didn't have to question their job security every day). Instead of projecting strength they projected weakness, and they paid dearly for it.

But beyond all that it's the increasing culture of bureaucracy that's eaten away at MS. All the reorgs treating developers as nothing more than assembly line workers. All the incompetent middle managers and PMs that are 10x harder to get rid of than incompetent devs. All the silly out of order budget and management priorities. There's only so many times that an individual can pour their heart into a job and see nothing of substance come of it before they decide to move on to greener pastures.

The worst part of the whole thing is that few people realize the significant amount of lag between when a company starts falling down before it hits bottom. Losing a ton of talented devs probably won't stop you from shipping the current version of whatever is in the pipeline, or even the next version. It'll just mean a lot of projects that would have been conceived won't be, and it'll be harder to execute on a lot of projects that should have been a slam dunk. More so, being able to work with more talented devs is a big perk for other devs, which will tend to accelerate the exodus at all levels. And typically people will make up their mind to leave months or even years before they actually do. By the time it's actually supremely obvious that all the good talent has left it's far too late to do anything about it.
1 million phones per DAY, 365 million per year - more than Microsoft activates new PC's with Windows in the same time, and it's failing?

The upgrade process is a mess, but it certainly shows no signs as "failing" in the market.
Something which isn't commented on anywhere else:

The two more common uses of "shortly" indicate something is going to happen soon and that something was phrased in a curt, abrupt manner.

Almost all uses of shortly that mean "concise" also tend to have the curt, abrupt, somewhat negative connotation. The only times I've seen uses of shortly that have only the "brief" shade of meaning, there is still a connotation of something simple, that somehow someone has overlooked. (Example: "to put it shortly," which is interchangeable with, "to put it simply.")

Because of this, no native English speaker would title a such headline in a positive sense with the adjective "shortly" meaning brief.

Admittedly, this is confusing because "shortly" used in the sense of "happening soon" does often carry a positive connotation. Unfortunately, English is Byzantine and full of exceptions and connotations and not completely orthogonal. (It is orthogonal here from a strictly syntactic sense, but not from the common usage one.)
Firefox's Mobile OS
It's really not that hard. If the news is actually interesting to me - I assume (that if i'm a reflection of my readers) it will be interesting to them.

Basic product pitches, 500 words context setting shit and partnership stuff is often not interesting. Something i've never heard of before, something that will improve the way I work and live - that's what I crave.

Pitch me on that - and I'll write.
What do you call a "feature"? How many features does Blogger have in your definition?
Also, is scalping a bad thing? It seems to me that they are making the market more efficient.

It might make the market more effecient. But it annoys your customers.