skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I particularly hate about MS branding right now is those stupid, unnecessary (TM) and (R)'s that follow names of their products... Just look at this picture for God's sake: http://www.minimallyminimal.com/storage/post-images/microsof... or head over to their website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

It's ridiculous. So "Windows" is a registered trademark of Microsoft. Big deal, but why put it after every single mentioning of the name?! Doesn't it bother you ( = MS marketing guys) to see little dots (they're so little that you can't even say if they're (tm) or (r)'s!) after product names? Isn't it ugly in your opinions?

Apple doesn't do it. Google doesn't either. Oracle does it too, however. Congrats, MS; you're as uncool as a database company.
I just use Dashboard for that. Don't most platforms have desktop widgets?
Anyone who thinks stack ranking is good, seriously quit your job you are complete dumb cunt.
The graphics on this are just so awesome. In particular black-and-white images with those particular font choices.

What are those fonts? Really interested.
You're not going to be able to sell this on HN. The HFT apologists will come invade this thread and go on for paragraphs on end about how market makers provide a valuable service that would otherwise not be provided.

Without scalpers (HFT) apparently absolutely no commerce in the relevant market would ever occur.
It's kind of sad that Apple has virtually no competition for its MacBook Pro and MacBook Air in terms of build quality (last time I checked, I'd be happy to be proved wrong). Nowadays, I barely care about "hard" specs (CPU, memory, etc.) when shopping for a laptop, what I really care about is: low heating, low weight, thinness, long battery life and strong build quality. Although I'd rather use Linux than OS X, it's hard to find a laptop of comparable quality to the MacBooks for the requirements I mentioned (of course, it isn't to hard to find if what you are interested in is raw speed and performance).
Facebook's Email Debacle And Resulting User Backlash
The Democrats have long been best friends with the Entertainment Industry, but so what? The Vice-President simply has no power to order anything more complex than pizza. He can suggest, plead, and implore, but someone else has to actually take the responsibility for the action and order something to occur.

This is a discussion, not a Court of Law, so let me state my view clearly: Kim Dotcom created an extensive enterprise aimed specifically at violating copyrights while attempting to shield the enterprise with the minimum amount of "compliance" they could get away with. It's entirely possibly that his corporation broke no laws. Regardless of his possible legal innocence, the speculations of a sleezy businessman like Dotcom regarding the integrity of the Vice President is unworthy of consideration.
Very impressed by the speed of response.
This guy needs to start a rent-your-car-for-the-night-as-a-bed , an AirBnB for your car. Or a startup that sells kits allowing you to turn any car into a place to live while camping or travelling cross country. Or a startup that sells life-saving kits allowing you to live out of your car for up to x days in case of an emergency.
What about it resembles Apple's branding?
Core.logic.intro from EuroClojure by Edmund Jackson
Personally I use iGoogle daily simply because of the Gmail/Calendar integration (don't need to open anything else to see those) right on the first page I see when I open my browser. It allows me to start my day at one glance: new emails, daily events, and RSS feeds of overnight news. When I switched to it, I was previously using Netvibes. I switched because it loaded roughly 5x faster than Netvibes.

There are some things I don't like about it. The header is gigantic. I wish I could turn that off and add a few more feeds without needing to scroll. iGoogle has also been breaking a lot lately. I actually removed my Gmail feed simply because it never worked even though it was developed by Google themselves.

I'm sad to see it go, but it's better than the sorry state it's been in for the last few years.
That is why I still beleive open-sourced, non-profit organizations will never be able to compete with the major powerhouses. Apple and Microsoft have the resources gained from charging high prices for their products to be able to constantly innovate and perfect their products. Ubuntu is an operating system built on the free time of developers, that does not receive the complete attention needed of a full fledged product. Ubuntu will have to change it's philosophy to be able to compete with the big powers.
Nitpick: while Koodo is owned by Telus, Wind is independent. Chatr, Fido, and Virgin are some of the other brands owned by the big operators. (Solo was another one, I just learned they're being killed off by Bell now.)
This can go either way.

Remember when dcurtis did a unsolicited spec redesign for the American Airlines website? We here at HN tore him a new one (justifiably so, it ignored so many critical aspects of the business, and came off as entirely impractical).

When you do something like this, you better be sure you nail every single angle of it.

FWIW, I normally hate spec redesigns - they're usually positioned in a pompous, "I know better than everyone", self-aggrandizing way. But this one I really like, this one strikes a chord.
This is a terrible article written without any grasp of the underlying realities of delivering the services the author discusses.

Applauding Verizon for instituting Draconian bandwidth practices may increase value for shareholders, but it is antithetical to the nature of development on the web and in the world. Can you imagine how development of the Internet might've fared if caps had been instituted in the 80's?

Capping wireless isn't the answer, and the author is ignorant to pursue justification through the lens of progression. Capped data plans are not an evolution, they are a regression.
Yup, and great for him! I wish more would do the same.
A lottery doesn't seem to me to do anything but mitigate the benefit of fancy redialers or other automated ways of getting your ticket order in first. With or without a lottery, allowing resale for profit gives people willing to pay more a better shot at seeing the performance. Preventing it means everyone who's willing to pay the set price has an equal shot. I've always assumed that's the goal of anti-scalping schemes.
Where is "increase font size on blog" in your roadmap?
Usually you can 'pre-arrange' start and end times.

It also goes much easier once you realize it's about participation (making decisions) than it is about productivity.

Unless of course your participation isn't required, then you can spend your time better at another store checking out the latest games or books.
Thanks.

May be in the future if this one becomes successful. For now I just want to put all my energy into this project.
"Purely digital" means it avoids real-world metaphors like postal mailboxes, analog clocks and magnetic tape.
Almost Two-Thirds of Android Devices Still Use Gingerbread
Tcl has really good support for this, actually. It's a bit of a messy concept, but in the end, it works out pretty well.
Vizios new laptop and ultrabook look like they may be competitors. They've designed them from the ground up and ship without bloatware if you choose to run Windows. http://www.vizio.com/computing/
The article claims people never close their browser (ridiculous, since Chrome updates every 15-20 minutes). I see my desktop a lot less often than I look at my homepage. Even when I close my browser, there's often another screen open behind it.

Besides, the benefit of iGoogle is you can see the same thing on every computer you visit. Can't do that with desktop widgets.
AFAIK, it doesn't do anything. You can use it to connect to a server and spawn monsters that stand still.
Some drawbacks I can imagine are you'll need everyone to drive out to it. You may also not have many choices for lunch and dinner.
Thanks for the feedback!

Up until recently, I was a one-man dev "team", so I didn't get a chance to discuss these topics while developing our app, and I just went with what seemed right. I'll be thinking about your ideas moving forward. I especially like the bit about the global User object with flags! (In hindsight, it seems almost obvious there should be one!)

This fact that every team ends up doing things their own way, and many times re-inventing the wheel, is the reason why architectures like Marionette and Aura have appeared. Also coming from Rails, I prefer using a framework that helps with these decisions up front, so I'm seriously considering moving to, for example, Ember.js (which was still called SproutCore 2 when I started developing...). Interesting times ahead though,.. with so much exploration going on in the Single Page App "arena", it's really hard to tell how things will end up!
> the speculations of a sleezy businessman like Dotcom regarding the integrity of the Vice President is unworthy of consideration.

Textbook ad hominem. His business practices are completely irrelevant to the questions of impropriety raised and the illegal conduct of the authorities involved.
I don't really have a good answer other than that in e-commerce software development is only a tiny part of the equation.
I just enjoy the time with her... I pick sexy outfits that maybe she won't try herself... and I ask her to try them on.
She can't say no... since she has already dragged me to the store..
so.. sexy girlfriend... buys clothes to make me happy ;-)
there is nothing wrong with that.
Virality? What are we supposed to get excited about - a clock ticking down?
Could that graph possibly be more misleading? Plotting the ratio of a number to one much smaller exaggerates small changes so you miss the big picture: PC sales dwarf Mac sales.

A better graph: two lines, one showing PC sales each year and the other showing Mac sales. It would show that Mac sales are less, and it would also show how much the market has grown since 1984. Even better: the number of machines of each type currently in use.
I think the terms "no possible way" and "100% sure" are inappropriate for an economic discussion. There's always the possibility of some event occurring.

What you're implying is that there is infinite demand for a Rolling Stones concert at any price. As far as I know, this is a concept on the extreme edge of economic theory. Maybe there could be infinite demand for necessities like oxygen should we be forced to make a decision, but for a concert the notion is absurd. If the tickets were priced at $1,000,000 per seat, I doubt you would sell out.

The bottom line is that there IS an appropriate price which will maximize consumer and producer surplus utility (the positive difference between what you were willing to buy/sell the goods for and what you actually bought/sold the goods for), and scalpers/secondary markets will exist when the principal seller misprices the tickets. Without the secondary markets, that ideal price will probably not be reached, and there will be a shortage or surplus of the goods.
This is important; while it's not really a general vulnerability, you could run into a lot of trouble if someone's performing a targeted attack. I don't think I'd ever really read anything in any consumer-facing OAuth2 documentation about the important of state, and given the breadth of sites vulnerable to the issue, it seems like a lot of other people don't know about it either.

Patching this in my Rails apps was easy; it's a trivial solution, but I'm leaving it here to demonstrate that it's not a hard fix.

When generating the URL to redirect to for authorization:

session["#{service}_oauth2_state"] = ActiveSupport::SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(24)

Then, pass state as a param when generating my OAuth authorization URL.

When the authorizing endpoint returns:

session_state = session["#{service}_oauth2_state"]
if params[:state] != session_state or session_state.blank?
render :text => "Unable to validate login state." and return
end

It's worth noting that I did have to update Koala (the Facebook API library we're using) to get arbitrary parameters passed through to #url_for_oauth_code. Older versions had a hardcoded list of parameters, which did not include state.
That picture is hilarious, it's literally a clone of Apple's Mac line-up, right down to the wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad.
I like how designers are beginning to feel compelled to point out the disconnect between the old Microsoft and the new. To me this signifies the impending reinvention of the Microsoft brand. Their development tools (like Visual Studio 2012) are so far ahead of anything out there that their new product designs delight without surprise. That being said, these proposed designs take minimalism too far.
I'm not advocating for 'capping' data plans, I'm applauding the company's focus on charging customers by data plan instead of their call/text usage. As an aside, texting and phone use are not 'capped,' in the way you are defining it.

I also don't think this is Draconian by any means, it is a pay-per-use model...is github's pricing model Draconian in your view?
You're right, but I think that's exactly what MSFT needs.

> "Look at Instagram. Cozy and nostalgic polaroid filters."

Microsoft is an enterprise and productivity tools company, first and foremost. They build platforms, and their chief value proposition is still "getting shit done for people and businesses", which is a far cry from the "share personal moments" of Instagram or "stylish, sexy" of Apple.

Whatever brand they take needs to reflect this. Right now their brand reflects "corporate, staid, boring, completely uninnovative", but perhaps that uber-sleek, coldly professional look is exactly what they need.

After all, we know Microsoft doesn't stand a chance going toe to toe with Apple, playing by Apple's rules (cute, emotional, nostalgic, soft). Changing the rules is pretty much all they've got going for them.
Blue is so facebook, and everybody hates facebook at the moment, so we are grey/yellow for now. Has some potential for pivoting though.

And since customer satisfaction is everything, we published our progress on https://twitter.com/doublestealth/status/220277242935246848 just for you.
> Where police used to sit in daily meetings to plan where to patrol, they can now spend more time actually out on patrol, since the computer's doing the planning.

While this is a nice application of machine learning, I can't help but wonder how much of their increase is due to the above fact.

Police being part bigger parts of their neighborhoods must be a non-negligible variable.
Somewhere in there is some hacking right?
What's the point of a paywall if you put all the relevant information in the "teaser"?
While I'm all for decrying corrupt business practices there are far more worthwhile targets out there like Goldman Sachs but they've bought political immunity and worse still this case clearly shows the ugly side of insidious corruption in American politics regardless of your views on Kim Dotcom.

His worse crime seems to have been not paying off the politicians.

And cheering that on from the sidelines seems an odd choice for a rallying call against legalized corruption.
It's thinking behind part of a book chapter we're writing for http://tractionbook.com
Customizable background patterns and icons, changes reflected instantly
Saying that Tilera has 10000 cores in production is the same as saying they have 100-300 chips in production (each Tilera CPU has 36 to 100 cores).
They need to update but androids have problems because some carriers do not automatically upgrade
> Concepts like damages decided by a judge reflect an objective fact (eg loss of business) that is in no way measurable

Right, but we could right a formula to get close enough.

Compensation = (official estimate or bid to repair damages) * ( 1.3 for hardship)

These variables could be punched into a program and a consistent result would come out.

> and concepts like "beyond reasonable doubt" reflect facts that are measurable but subjective

That doesn't make any sense to me. Facts are not supposed to be subjective. Especially considering the use of "reasonable doubt" is subjective, for example, officers claiming PC based on drug odors.

> I'm completely ignoring the other functions of courts, like legislative oversight, that obviously can't be performed by an algorithm.

Why can't an algorithm do "legislative oversight"?

Update ---

> Where measurable techniques have become available to law - DNA profiling, for example - they're taken up very quickly.

DNA has been used to set people free that were locked away based on opinions. Why should ANYONE have the "discretion" to lock away a human being? I think that kind of trust comes from years of brainwashing and episodes of CSI (or the million other variants).
I haven't got excited about a mockup since I saw the windows 8 concepts:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/24/2822891/windows-desktop-ui...
I don't get it. It's just collecting and digitizing document format reference manuals?

I guess I feel a little underwhelmed, compared to the expectations raised by the post's title.
I'd tend to agree that Workspaces are "nice to have" rather than particularly important, but aside from "show desktop" and (the very nice) Aero Snap, Windows doesn't have any particularly useful window management tools at all.

To pick a (not entirely unimportant in the present context) nit, Spaces contain windows, not applications; each application has zero or more windows (an useful and important feature of OS X) contained in zero or more Spaces. There's an option to control whether or not switching to an application with no windows in the current Space switches to a (not "the") Space that does contain such windows, and the default ("yes") is sensible.

The quick way to switch to a different window in OS X is Exposé, which is broken in Lion, but fixed in Mountain Lion (clear "Group windows by application" in Mission Control Preferences).

Finally, the quickest way to switch between specific applications, windows, or even arbitrary Cocoa UI elements is binding AppleScripts to key combinations (using one of many tools; Alfred.app is as good a place as any to start). For anything more complicated than 'tell application "Foo" to activate', Script Debugger [1] and Accessibility Inspector [2] are your friends.

[1] http://www.latenightsw.com/

You can learn more about AppleScript in the course of its free 20 day evaluation period than you could in 20 months with Apple's tools (and $199 only sounds expensive until you use AppleScript nontrivially for the first time).

[2] Traditionally bundled with Xcode, it's been split out into a separate "Accessibility Tools" package in some recent builds, and hidden inside the Xcode.app bundle in others (though Spotlight should still find it).
Yes!?
The fascinating thing about Microsoft today is they find themselves in such a strategically desperate position that they are beginning to change that attitude.
RIM CEO: 'There's Nothing Wrong With The Company'
The striking thing to me about the MU shutdown was the timing right after the defeat of SOPA. It was like the government wanted to teach "the people" a lesson for getting too uppity. Like "Oh, you think we can't shut down your websites just because we don't have this little law that you rose up against? Well watch this."

With all the political uproar that was going on that week it would be surprising if the FBI had not gone to the White House before pulling the trigger on the raid.
PCs are now fucked in the moneyed mass market. The 'PC' brand is sunk - PC is to computer what Blackberry is to phone - you'll get one from your company, but you covet an iPhone/Macbook. This is thanks to:

a) The sub-par cheap plastic laptops/netbooks that have been thrown out for the last three years at $300. They were barely usable at first, and now the keys have fallen off the keyboard and the speakers don't work. And that advert to renew some antivirus keeps popping up. And the computer whizzkid who used to fix it says he doesn't know much about PCs now - he's moved to an Apple Mac.

b) Windows and IE. People are noticing that Facebook runs like crap in IE. And that their harddrive still needs formatting every year or the computer runs like a bag of shit. What's that Microsoft? Windows 8 has all this fixed. It doesn't matter - there are still millions of computers out there running Vista and Win 7, taking 60 seconds to boot up (standby mode never works - fuck knows why). Everytime I sit in front of one and right click-Exit all that shit down at the bottom right I curse you.

c) The death of desktop software.

-

This is one of the two reasons I'm bullish on Apple (the other is that I want to see them move into the living room.)

Now PCs and Linux - that's more like it but there's no profit in it.
wow... you consider a market to be something which maximises all possible monies rather than something where you obtain something for use. No wonder this 'scalpers are helping the system' theme sounds crazy.
> The Vice-President simply has no power to order anything more complex than pizza. He can suggest, plead, and implore, but someone else has to actually take the responsibility for the action and order something to occur.

Although officially the office only has a couple of duties, a modern US VP has a bunch of roles and powers that are not outside of the law but not spelled out. Really, modern US VPs are kinda like co-presidents. VPs now get included in cabinet meetings, do negotiations with Congress or more. Kennedy put LBJ in charge of the space program. Rockafeller headed certain judicial inquiries. Nixon, when he was VP, sat in on the National Security Council.

So, when Biden talks, is that Obama talking? Maybe.

> Kim Dotcom created an extensive enterprise aimed specifically at violating copyrights while attempting to shield the enterprise with the minimum amount of "compliance" they could get away with. It's entirely possibly that his corporation broke no laws.

That's no different than what other companies do, now. Sometimes they won't even go that far. :)

Anyways, if the words “Obedience to the law is liberty” means anything, that has to include our leaders, too.
:) It's a combination of two things:
1. The director, Wicus Labuschagne, is a personal friend. He was my first professional web client and needed an explainer video for his portfolio.
2. Here in South Africa the exchange rate is 8.10 ZAR/USD. A pint of beer is roughly 50% cheaper than a pint in LA.
Nah, just the low market share.

And personal gripe.
When minimalism is a desired trait, it isn't far fetched to see competing firms to come up with similar designs.
"Tilera has a the first non-x86 64-bit based server available in the market"

There must be some mistranslation here, because I'm pretty sure that 64-bit SPARC and PPC servers have been around for a while.

That said, after digging a little bit, Tilera's stuff looks really cool. Does anyone know if it's possible for ordinary mortals to get ahold of their hardware?
A New $99 Console Is Real and Different From Xbox, PlayStation and Wii
Browsers are a "winner take most" market because of website support and extensions. IE and chrome have rich parents, and firefox had much better extension community.
Look, I'm a Mac user, but it's time we cut down with this, it makes me sick like the stupid kids on Gizmodo. The Vizio computers look good and they are not Mac clones. They picked the right ideas from Apple that nobody else picked up and they are doing a great job without looking the same.