skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple will do so, too, in many cases. They are, in fact, pretty generous when it comes to replacing something they don’t have to. It’s, however, inconsistent and if there is any dispute the company always wins. That’s the case with any company.

Again, in Germany there is no confusion because we have two different words for it. Well, there is some confusion but the two words is how all companies do it. I don’t think companies are even allowed to advertise something that is your right anyway (like the mandated warranty), that’s probably the reason why they don’t say anything.
Realize that the difference between 2500 and 2200 is truly remarkable.

Those under 2000 should probably be considered enthusiasts rather than exceptional.
UPDATE: 2:55pm Eastern - @ZendeskOps say they (along with other customers at their hosting provider) are under a DDoS attack.
How does it work with ads? For example, if I get a 30s ad and the other person gets a 60s ad, does it still sync up?

I watch shows like this (on hulu, hbo go, netflix) w/ my SO fairly often and one thing I found with hulu is that oftentimes our videos get out of sync due to minor glitches here and there, e.g. we'll sync up after the end of a commercial break, but by the next commercial break we're out of sync by 5+ seconds. Just something to keep in mind...
I guess it probably depends on what you mean by exceptional. The real top players seem to be entrepreneurial within the e-sports space but I don't know of much branching beyond that. If you look at simply high ranked players (masters or grandmaster) it might be more interesting.

My anecdotal experience, I only competed locally in Washington DC, was there were a lot of developers or technical people (~75%). It was also disproportionately asian (~50%). And Male (~90%). Pretty much every stereotype about who was playing was my actual experience.

The better players (masters or higher+) were all technical people of some sort that I can recall. 4 were developers. 1 in grad school for machine learning. 1 biochem engineering.

It wouldn't shock me to see some talented starcraft players who also are founders. I just am not convinced that being a good starcraft player has any/much effect on being a successful company. Correlation != Causation and all that. It may just be a common hobby among the demographic we're interested in.
Leaving money on the table does no one any favors. If people are willing to pay $150 for tickets and hes charging $50 (or whatever it is), he's only doing himself a disservice.

If people are willing to pay that much and he delivers a show that is up to his normal standard, they won't hate him for charging them that much; quite the opposite actually. It's only the price gauging and poor service of monopolies that people tend to hate (and for good reason).

Now, if you are saying 'what about the people who cant afford $150 for tickets?'. If it's not a charity show, the world definitely does not owe you tickets to a stand-up comedy show. On the other hand, charity shows are fine, but he should call it like it is if thats the case. $50 for tickets means the rich will pay less than theyre willing to pay and the poor won't get in anyways. No one wins in that situation.
Haha. yes! I think we should just say that straight up.
Eh? By Phone I suppose you meant Windows Phone? And Xbox runs the NT kernel for sure (though no way to confirm that).
Stack ranking where you fire the bottom 10% (even though they were supposedly A players when you fired them; what did you do to ruin them?), is just a manifestation of managers that have a hard-on for a brain.
You're operating on the flawed assumption that the sole endeavor hear is to extract as much money from consumers as possible.

No, that's why you have an initial lottery. With a lottery, poorer fans still have a chance to get a ticket.
If you have a problem with a person, either with their results or with their behavior, fire them.

Whole review process is designed to help managers avoid making tough decisions like firing bad apples.

In Microsoft, I got one year underachieving mark, and that made huge dent on my career. It took open-minded manager (who was recent external hire) to offer me a spot in new group. After that, I did really great, got promotion and enjoy the work.

Now, tell me, how giving me bad mark helped Microsoft? It kept me in miserable state for a year and half, forced me to work with people who already said that I am failure, and I surely didn't produce much at that time.

However, next year, I (same person, working same job), got middle-of-the-road review, and was officially allowed to look for a position elsewhere... But no hiring manager will talk to me. Whenever you apply for a position inside Microsoft, first question hiring manager asks is: What are your last three/four/five review scores? As soon as any of those is 4 (in today's system), they will stop talking to you. You cannot get even informationals... Some jerks don't even want to answer your emails anymore...

Dolphin, I know you are all smart and shiny, but axe is waiting for you too... Yank-and-rank...
I posted and complained about that same skeumorphic podcasts app today. Apple leads so much in the realm of hardware design but is starting to take steps backwards in it's own application/software design. I'm very anxious and hopeful for Microsoft to progress in this arena and give Apple some competition.
a good one, indeed!
Definitely. One reason I like Ocaml so much.
When I first started playing w Siri I asked it every silly question. Then I stopped using it as the novelty wore off. But then I started using it again for very narrow tasks: Everything from asking the temperature to song requests. I think if you're looking for Hal that Siri isn't it, but on a small scale it works well.

From the point of view if usability the only thing I dislike about it is that I have to click to get Siri, if Siri could be summoned by just talking at the phone (no button clicks) that would be killer.
Huh... I had no idea the Windows 1.0 logo looked like that. It's actually rather timeless. Kinda interesting that they've brought it back a little with the new logo.
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.
I used the think the same thing, but it's not clear to me that Microsoft "needs" saving. They're growing the enterprise side of their business quite fast and the problem just seems to be that investors expect them to be the next Apple, whereas Ballmer is turning them into the next IBM.

They'll still make boatloads of money on the enterprise side and that'll be enough to keep them floating for decades to come, so I continue to wonder if there truly is a problem with their business strategy or if it's just misaligned expectations.
The artificial demand you mention is essentially speculation. The scalpers are betting that the actual price attendees are willing to pay is higher than the initial selling price, which leads them to buy the ticket. This system still requires players who ultimately purchase the tickets for the utility of seeing the show. If $100 tickets ultimately get sold for $2,000 to actual attendees, the original seller significantly underpriced their tickets. There was a full market of people willing to buy the tickets for $2,000 for the show. Scalpers didn't mess with this market or confuse demand. They made the market efficient. The fans who valued the show the most got the enjoyment utility of attending. This system primarily hurts the fans who couldn't afford the more expensive tickets. On the other hand, without a secondary market, the fans who valued the show the most are harmed.

The only way that scalpers can create artificial demand is if there are no attendees willing to pay the price scalpers want to charge. In that scenario, scalpers sell to other scalpers at higher and higher prices, and the last person (scalper) to buy loses. If the last scalper buys the ticket for $4,000 and there is no party willing to buy the ticket for at least that AND see the show, the scalper is left with two options - go to the show (which by definition for the scalper provides less utility than the ticket price warrants), or sell the ticket at a loss (or possibly for $0, if there are no buyers).

I think there is a good analogy to other forms of speculation, particularly in commodities. Speculators "drive up" the price of oil by buying and selling it for more and more, but as long as consumers are willing to pay for that oil, the price is justified, and the original sellers forfeited their potential profit.

Granted, oil and housing speculation can lead to bad things for the economy as a whole. Here I think the analogy fails, since tickets are inherently a temporary market with an expiration date. Without an expiration date you can have bubbles, and bubbles can burst.
Something similar happened to me. It's not necessarily that the hire is intended to be sacrificial, but it sometimes falls to the "new guy" to take the hit.

So after about 3-4 months of working at Microsoft, I was ranked in the bottom 10% (the bucket for people who don't have good prospects for furthering their career at Microsoft.) This was back when they used a 10/70/20 system.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm some master developer that deserves to always be in the top 20%. I strive to be above average, but I consider myself to be merely average, especially compared to many of the exceptionally bright people working there.

Here's the real bitch. The reason I was given for this rating had nothing to do with my performance. I shit you not, and this is as verbatim as I remember it: "Somebody has to be in the bottom bucket and since you're new, I can't rank you higher."

The problem is that this stuff fucks with your career there. It's a black mark on your record that follows you around. HR assured me that someone being new is not a valid reason to rank someone like that, you have to base it on actual performance.

An easy fix that my previous company had employed: have a "too new to rate" category.

In retrospect, I just had a shitty boss, and it wasn't necessarily reflective of Microsoft as a whole. I also should have challenged it more vigorously, but I didn't want to create animosity between my boss and myself seeing as I was barred from transferring for.. 18 months was it?

I'm not too bitter about it though; I ultimately ended up resigning after a year and then coming back to work for the same department as a contractor at a much higher salary. As such, I no longer had to participate in performance reviews at all.
John, I have a question for you. I didn't know you worked at Cloudflare, so I looked up the "people" page last night, and I'm intrigued that while there are many "engineers", you are the only "programmer".

I assume you got to choose your title, and I'm interested to know why you chose that one. (For what its worth, it's a title I think personally wish more people should adopt, especially those who don't do formal engineering.) Is it a US vs UK thing?
Well of course, I couldn't agree more!

My point was that the original post seemed really judgmental in implying that building a RegEx engine ought to be done by everybody. Instead of "every programmer ought to have the experience", they could have said, "it can be valuable to have the experience".

But a blanket statement that every programmer should do X... is really annoying and shows a very narrow worldview. Programmers are diverse, and do lots of different things.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this story. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

It just doesn't seem any different from a host of corporate conferences I've help produce. The fact that they got Herbie Hancock shows that this wasn't balls instead of budget.

Even Micheal Jackson likes macs? Working at a popular, high profile tech firm can help when making cold calls?

tx
What is so wrong with Windows? Seriously. It's not perfect, but I'm yet to find an OS that is.
"The thing to understand in selling into this market is you need to adapt your "logical" marketing and sales strategy to the way enterprises buy. I say adapt b/c you can't make or help a dysfunctional buyer behave differently."

Is it easier to sell towards the good inclinations or the bad inclinations of a company?

Good inclinations is pretty obvious for us in the tech start-up scene. Think Yammer.

Bad inclinations is basically playing on fear and laziness of the large corporation. I know of a small company that makes pretty good money selling what is basically an advance employee tracking system that enforces internal security policy and procedures. It's a nice way of saying "Let's track all employees to quickly discover threats like Yammer before it spreads amongst the company to create a security hazard". Or, "we must force everyone to go through our department because that's what policy says thus using your software to do so". Of course, the reason they don't want to use this department is because they are more dysfunctional then the rest of the company. Software which enforces the bad policies and procedures of the company but allows them to "feel" more secure.
> It isn't in your advantage to make your coworkers look bad, it is in your favor to make them look great, because they review you!

True, but that can also be gamed in a classic case of kill the curve wrecker. Let's say Alice and Bob are excellent programmers, Charles through Henry are mediocre, and Isabella and Jerome are terrible. Everyone can go into the performance reviews and state their honest opinions, resulting in raises for Alice and Bob and a pink slip for Jerome.

On the other hand, Charles and Dana can get together with Jerome and Isabella. They agree to make each other look great and make Alice and Bob look terrible. If it works, then Charles and Dana get raises and Jerome and Isabella don't need to worry about their jobs. In fact, working together to throw Alice and Bob under the bus comes out to a happy ending for 80% of the department, so it shouldn't be to hard to get Erin through Henry in on the scheme.

Of course, once Alice and Bob are canned, it's a little awkward for Charles and Dana, since they're the new top of the chain. However, the rest of the department already knows that they're willing to deal. Charles and Dana agree to talk up Erin and Frank, so they wealth gets spread around. As for who gets the bottom ranks, just bad mouth Zach and Yolanda, the new hires that replaced Alice and Bob. This prevents needing to trust new members to the conspiracy while everyone gets to keep their job without needing to expend any effort to improve their skills. And, as I said, it's a happier ending for 80% of the original employees.
That would bankrupt them very quickly. They only made NT because they had to, and it took years to transition. Also, there's really nothing wrong with it.
Its still very "corporationish".

If you see the ads for ipad or iphone (siri) on mute, you could mistake them for a Johnson & Johnson ad. Ie bright colors, people in the spaces they normally inhabit - running in the park, cooking at home etc.

Microsoft needs to lose the corporate image and become what apple brands itself - part of your life.
I didn't find it good at all. Why "microsoft" and not "Microsoft"? And the logo is ugly.

well, after all, it's just a matter of opinion.
You're free to resell your downloaded games, what next?
If you get bored of a game, you can resell it whenever you want, an European Court of Justice decides. But how will giant companies react to this decision? How will justice assure itself that no one will abuse this law, continuing to use the game he doesn't own anymore?
Automate SQL Server Express Backups with Powershell
No, every change to a responsive site can break other resolutions/media queries without your knowing. Or do you routinely view your site on an iphone, Android, ipad, Kindle, netbook, laptop, and 30" monitor?

You're claiming responsive comes for free, or is no harder than purely non-responsive. Definitely not true.
heh that's interesting i went to high school with vivek rao, he was a couple years behind me iirc. he said once (i think he was quoting someone else):

a good chess player is the sign of a good mind. a great chess player is the sign of a wasted mind.
that's just one point of view, there were also a lot of very cool Soviet era designs, like the Lomo camera, for example.
That was an idea they (probably) stole from Jack Welsh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
Solve it by detailing the past, not defining a new format to replace all others (aka format #11). I got the impression they wanted to to the latter until the second half.

Sounds a reasonable plan, though scanning in all sorts of records between typewriter and file formats (not a time period I know anything about) is the sort of thing to be done the same way and possibly more important.
Infograph: Facebook interprets your love life?
Thanks for the reply! But even the Deutsche Bank's logo has a square around it, which again makes it visually easier to center. I guess it's just me, but I can't help noticing how it doesn't looks centered, even if it is.

Also I didn't realize Deutsche Bank has such an appealing domain name!
John proposed the title and I thought it was great. He wrote a blog post about it:

http://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html
1. It makes a big difference if this policy is implemented at the team or company level

2. It makes a big difference if the policy is mandatory or advisory. If it is advisory, it can be a powerful tool for eliminating actual non-contributors / negative contributors on a team

3. This sort of policy works better when there is a lot of fat to trim. In fact, when there is a lot of fat to trim, any policy that identifies non-contributors and enables them to move on is going to be beneficial to the company

4. Implementing a stack ranking policy for a long time I think would have negative consequences for morale. The goal is to fire people who are doing negative work and causing problems. There will be unintended consequences of any policy that pursues this goal, exacerbated if only the bottom 1% are doing consistently negative work.

It sounds like Microsoft mis-used a powerful management tool. This is a great thing for start-ups hungry for talent!
Humans don't parse language the way computers do. When they see a phrase commonly associated with movement the concept of movement will enter their minds, even if a precise analysis of the sentence does not indicate movement.
That was the hard part :) I keep track of where everyone is in commercials. If you finish early, the video is paused and it says you're waiting for the other person to finish.

As for glitches: I experimented with a good way to fix this, but settled with just resyncing at every action (pause/play/commercial/etc). It would be annoying to have it keep syncing constantly, and a few seconds due to dropped frames isn't a huge deal.
The Open Alternative to Apple’s Mac App Store: Bodega
Even MS wanted IE6 dead. In this case, it is all about Google trying to force a very good browser that has brought in great ideas and features, in addition to the performance and standards compliance, out of the market.
I guess we will have to disagree on the value and civility of articulate bigotry.
"The reason I felt it important to pass on this news to non-Opera users is that I’m wondering if Google are going to stop at Opera? I get the sense that this could be the thin end of a wedge, and that Opera may not be the only browser which ends up getting the cold shoulder."

I doubt Google will give a cold shoulder to browsers with actual market share.

I'm glad Opera exists to keep a check on the other browser makers... I'm also glad Opera only has 1% market share so I can ignore it when I make own websites.
Fighting Facebook Tracking: Hover over F like on the bottom of the page.
Here he is making a comment on an article about 8-bit BASIC: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43&cpage=2#comment-103039

"This history is SURPRISINGLY accurate. Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC."

(that whole blog is awesome if you're into 8-bit CPU's, by the way, and who isn't?).
a little research turns up: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." -- Paul Morphy
LOL

Opera is the browser that adheres to the specifications most closely, and yet it is the least usable. Why? Because web developers don't test with it. Specs are irrelevant. Testing is relevant, and testing is caused by marketshare.
Was looking at compasses for my students next year, and saw an interesting take on the "Facebook tracks you through like buttons" issue from an very unlikely source.
That's why it's an investment. Investments aren't guaranteed to bring you any results. But if they do, in this case it can be insane ROI!
wow - you apple-fied microsoft. I don't feel like it's a new image or brand identity, rather just try to fit them into that "other" brands persona. interesting concept, but I think it misses the mark on the actual audience of the brand.
Non deterministic regex engine is just plain stupidity. Am i missing something?
The broader burner community (hi!) were the ones screaming at the borg that this was a terrible idea. They didn't care.
*Two tickets per person
That's left as an exercise for the reader. Look at the channel synchronization and follow the code for both routines (the main and the goroutine). I'll admit in this case that it looks pretty deterministic, but in other cases it could be a different pattern.
So true fans are poor? What does having a fatter wallet have to do with your taste in comedy?

Also, fans don't work the way you think they do. If I like Louis CK, I like Louis CK. If he chooses to charge $500 for a ticket, I will just watch him on TV. It won't cause me to resent him.

In a perfect market, if enough people feel the same way, the price will drop down into the range that I am comfortable paying. If, on the other hand, he has so many fans that some are willing to pay exorbitant amounts to see him live, I will be forced to watch him on TV.

If he wants to give everyone (rich and poor) the chance to experience his set live, he needs to increase supply by touring more.
This is a great endeavour.Being resourceful to the maximum. But a question that comes to mind is fitness. This kind of lifestyle might be detrimental to health,especially sleep related disorders. How are you tackling this ?
Perpetual Design
Moving the needle
[google] does this go to http//google.com or http://wikipedia.com/Google?

URLs are as expressive as they need to avoid these namespacing issues. A custom system like yours is going to run up against naming collisions very quickly.
Downfall is a bit strong. Call me when Windows 8 is out of the door and it turns out to be an enormous flop. Until then, Windows 7 is a very solid os (the best iteration of windows MS has ever released imho); xbox rules the console gaming roost; exchange, active directory and c# dominate in the enterprise space; Office is still the best at what it does. The only parts they really suck at are web and phones.

To me that means they have some serious weaknesses (given the ever increasing importance of phone and web) but it doesn't mean they're in a death spiral. RIM... that's what real downfall looks like!
It is a chicken and egg case, right? Without support, no increase in market share, and no market share means, no support. Hence it is sad that a big player like Google does this, in an apparent act of getting more people on to Chrome. If Google does no evil, they will support ( we all know they can ) the most standards compliant browser.
"What I don't like is that they make repeated promises about AZes and features which are repeatedly shown to be untrue."

Thats pretty much SOP in the hosting business, nobody really knows whats going to happen because nobody really knows how to test. Most developers can/do not understand what ops failures are like, and therefore most testing is only superficial.