skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While he's not right about everything he writes, and if you can separate fact from opinion, younger readers should acquaint themsleves with Cringley's book Accidental [MB]illionaires. It will tell you all you need to know about Gate and Ballmer's management style.

Anyone who thinks Gates is both a genius (as in programming genius) and that this genius was responsible for the success of the company is wrong. One of those is not a true statement.

Gates and Ballmer were very aggressive and sociopathic, like Steve Jobs. This helped the company succeed. But success is really the result of the young talented programmers who signed on with them, and worshipped these characters.

In MS's case it was Simonyi, the man who gave us Excel. And before him, it was Allen who helped Gates get into business. Gates could not write the compiler tools himself. He needed Allen.

Some people might not appreciate the way these guys treat employees. Many simply would not tolerate being belittled by a guy who is not as smart as they are. (Gates' famous line "I don't know how technical your are." was supposedly his way of dealing with the many, many others who knew more than he did.) But... many programmers are happy to be treated this way. And this is management formula that works very well. Belittling the young and easily influenced, especially software programmers, works. Perhaps that is Gates' and Jobs' genius.

Read Cringley. I think you will come away realizing guys like Simonyi were the true geniuses.

Hollywood ending to this comment i.e., the moral question leaft to the viewer/reader: Not all geniuses are good leaders, but is it necessary to be an a-hole to be an effective leader (of geniuses)?
From another perspective, Chris Dodd is a lobbyist who's earned every penny of his pay. Still a scumbag, though.
It's not so much an argument "for scalping" as an argument against being emotional and extreme. So, once again, - no, not everyone benefits. Without the higher price tickets available from the scalpers, they would not have been able to go. They got what they wanted at a price they could afford. Disliking something is not the same as it being inherently and totally evil.
I am pretty excited about the possiblity of this. One thing that concerns me though, is that I am in no way interested in tying my facebook to anything I do professionally or really even personally. I hate that contraption and although I might be more convinced to link to my google plus, i really don't want much social media involved with my professional development. So i checked it out but didn't subscribe.

Would gladly give you my email though.
I'm suer you're right. I can only speak from my team[1] up the chain to Bezos, all of whom at that time I personally witnessed making really stupid decisions. (EG Bezos deciding not to fix a bug 2 months before Thanksgiving then the day before thanksgiving he decides it needs to be fixed right then, at 3am.)

I did find a better team within Amazon. I had an offer from one of the groups in AWS to do something right up my alley. It was basically a dream job. My manager blocked it. I appealed to HR and they simply ignored the "rules" (as they are in the handbook) and wouldn't let me leave.

So, one of the things-- the claim that you can go to another team if your manager doesn't perform-- turned out not to be true.

Rather than stay with a company that wasn't keeping its promises, I left. So, I can't speak to other teams. [2]

[1] Though 3 of the sibling teams at the same level, who reported to my bosses boss, were also run by bad guys, which cut off most of the obvious lateral transfers.

[2] It is possible things have improved, as it has been more than 3 years.
I agree, unfortunately it's already being used by Microsoft! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpzu3HM2CIo which led to this amazing parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ideYfNcEZsI
Google Shutdowns Google Video, iGoogle, Google Mini & More
I just sent this to my girlfriend, who is in China this summer while I'm in California. I'd actually been considering the best way to do something like this, so this will be perfect for us - thanks!
Well done! I worked on an Android/Node app a few months ago that also uses socket.io to do the same thing (synchronize video playback among a set of users). I was impressed at how well the Node server performed as the number of users grew, especially compared to a blocking TCP socket implementation.
Funny to see Eiffel with such a large circle even though it had very limited adoption. I had a soft spot for it once and failed miserably at getting it adopted in my company. Its contracts and invariants were very appealing and probably why it has such a large influence in this graph.
Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Each Donate $100,000 For Marriage Equality
"more time and resources than you can jump ahead of you in line and, as a result either deny you an experience or make you pay more out of pocket for it."

Isn't that the way the world works? We aren't talking about access to food, education, or healthcare here. We're talking about entertainment. Is there a particular reason why someone with more time or money shouldn't have an edge and be able to spend their money to do something someone with less money can't do?

If you fly enough you also can get upgraded to first class cabin. Is there something not fair about that as well?
Static linking of Go code is a conscious design decision, not some artifact of toolchain immaturity. It will never change.
Gabor's new startup
He's in the same class of users that brag about not owning a tv: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...
One way to look at all these shutdowns is that Google is on a hiring spree - for every one of these zombie projects they kill they get a bunch of engineers who are already vetted by Google's HR and are familiar with Google's dev processes.
Check out my debit card! Or: Why people make bad security choices.
The Plan 9 people (basically the same group as the Go people) have some philosophical problems with dynamic linking. Read http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ for their arguments.
Desktop widgets, maybe? Unless you want to access it from multiple devices.
Thanks for the great suggestions, and for your time! I will make the changes right away.
There’s Always a Way – The Time I Almost Spent $10,000 to Impress a Girl :p
I realize this sentiment is unpopular, but net neutrality is bad for the operator and bad for the consumer. It is a policy of essentially regulating routing decisions, its like letting the government make you use a particular webserver or programming framework to use.

I agree that the large MSOs haven't done a great job of responding to customer demands, but that in itself doesn't warrant new legislation to strangle them.
This isn't a situation requiring government action. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurship, where venues will have to take the risk of staying with Ticketmaster, or not. Clearly, Louis CK is exemplifying this.
Arranged by hand, but much better: http://www.levenez.com/lang/
That was the first time I saw the Windows 1.0 logo (I'm in college). It looks REALLY similar to the windows 8 logo, but I actually prefer the 1.0 logo. The asymmetric lines, and rounded edges really remind me of a lot of the app logos you see in the android and iphone market place, and it's single color scheme reminds me of metro's strong lines. I think it would have been cool if Microsoft pointed out where they got the windows 8 logo (assuming they did do a redesign of the 1.0 logo), and maybe kept a little more of the 1.0 icon look.
Internet Explorer 10: Do Not Track Turned On By Default
The only problem I have with the NEA is I'm being forced to pay for something I don't want. I don't care if you make a painting of the Virgin Mary out of elephant poo or put Jesus in a jar of your own piss but I do care if I'm forced upon pain of imprisonment to pay for it. I will never understand the "Greater Good" argument and the "Tragedy of the Commons" argument is just stupid in this case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ofili

EDIT:
The Virgin Mary painting was not, according to wiki, paid for by the NEA.
It's not clear who gets the refund here. If the scalper, then he has no risk, and earns both the money he sold it for AND the refund of the original fee. Win! This is also likely the only refund they can do since they don't have the credit card number of the person who bought the scalped ticket.

If they refund the final purchaser, then the scalper still makes his money and the purchaser loses the amount above the face value.

In both scenarios, the scalper makes his money, or even more than he would have otherwise.
As a reminder - you should never really use your debit card for purchases, you have a lot more protection with a real credit card. A credit card is also a debt instrument not your actual cash, so if someone steals your debit card you're screwed wheras if someone steals your credit card its no big deal.
This book gives a good perspective of some of the internal feuds at Microsoft (from the dotcom times):
http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Windows-Fumbled-Future-Micros...
It's not corruption if he didn't personally benefited from it.

The problem is that if your only source of information is biased, you take the wrong decisions.
Makes the choice of using them that much easier. :-)
"this situation has reached the point of requiring government action as this is now an antritrust issue "

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870476290457502...
Can MySQL reasonably perform queries on billions of rows?
At that point you're not adding anything to the conversation though, it's just noise. If you want to add vocal support to a comment you should at least expand on the points they brought up or provide some of your own reasoning.
Scalping benefits people who wouldn't have gotten tickets in a non-scalped sale (e.g. because there were twice the amount of people interested at face price than tickets available) and are willing to pay more to get the tickets. Scalpers are exploiting the rigid pricing and release schedules of the tickets.

I don't support scalping but wish the artists and promoters would step up the fight themselves too.
You posted a link that purported to dispute the OP's idea that users were still on XP. Yet the link you posted actually reinforced that a huge number were still on XP...
"The service dates back to a time when homepage portals were people’s entry points to the Internet."

In many parts of the world, portals are still hugely important... Yahoo is #1 in Japan, for example.
Seems quite interesting, though I found the format of the post extremely off-putting.
Day in the Life of a hackNY Fellow
You're putting words in my mouth.

> Without the higher price tickets available from the scalpers, they would not have been able to go.

Again, this is assuming that the amount of competition for the tickets is not affected by the scalpers. In reality, the scalpers are exactly the ones driving the scarcity.
On first glance at the headline, I really thought Kim Dotcom had gone off the deep end, but the evidence really does make it sound plausible.

Sigh. We definitely have the best politicians money can buy...
Sortfolio is dead. Long live Sortfolio.
"Four years later, in 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser... These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000"
GE's executive team claims otherwise[1]. "The top 20% and middle 70% are not permanent labels. People move between them all the time. However, the bottom 10%, in our experience, tend to remain there."

[1]: http://www.ge.com/annual00/letter/page4.html
However, Backgammon is really only useful for figuring things out about people who were alive in the 70s, as no one else plays it. It's a VERY boring game without gambling, which is illegal many places (the doubling die doesn't matter really without money).
Ask HN: does a compressed spring weigh more than the same spring uncompressed?
A comment on the recent Higgs Boson thread [1] stated that a "a compressed spring weighs more than the same spring uncompressed". Since I'm a complete physics noob, this intrigued me. A google search unfortunately didn't help much [2].

So, is this really true?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4193590

[2] http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=161069
Have you noticed that AWS has regular, significant outages? The web store does as well. The thing is, most of them don't affect the whole store or all customers. Amazon covers for a lot of this with superb customer service (provided you're willing to do it online.)

TL;DR: At the end of writing this I realized I was burying my lead. Since the only way to advance at amazon is to create new stuff, and teams are constantly reformed in the chaos, there are often nobody left to keep past efforts running and things just break down. So at best someone is avoiding the pain of getting yelled at in the weekly site outages, while also being yelled at because they have to constantly churn out new features, all the time.

AWS has some really good solid engineering work in it, no question.

But Amazon is compromised operationally by their completely chaotic engineering practices, which are a result of the political culture and C people in management. (Another person said they knew good team managers, and I am sure this is true in other teams, I just had a bad batch.... but I think as you go up the chain the quality goes down.)

Thus you have people who are between the Sr. Manager and VP level who don't understand technology and are not making decisions based on uptime. Uptime is "important" and thus teams who get blamed for downtime (not always accurately) get pressure on them... but there is a significant lack of anyone empowered to architecturally build a stable system.

They're still using code from the 1990s, and I periodically go to the site and test a couple regression cases I'm aware of that were bugs that were fixed. They've become unfixed in the intervening years, in fact, it appears that the team I left (which had lost %60 of its members at that point, for the same reason I left) was probably disbanded and there simply is nobody in the company who is charged with making sure that this stuff works... or its a responsibility of a team that is forced to spend almost all of its time putting in new features.
Show HN: Scholastica - Where Academic Journals Meet The Internet
But, if she's in China... how is she getting Hulu?
Perhaps a fantastic example of why keeping detailed configuration in environment variables is probably a bad idea. Your private SSH key isn't part of the environment. It's configuration. Treat it as such.
It appears that My Yahoo and NetVibes are still available, although pageflakes seems to have disappeared.
Optimizing your Linux server for memory-based NoSQL databases (Part I)
While this is true it seems ironic that we've replaced one predatory behemoth with another in the form of apple.
Where Google Is Going Next
Google is pushing all other browsers out of their way. How is this not evil?
Blurring is what Microsoft hopes to happen. But I don't see any evidence that this hope will be satisfied. It's like crossing a camel with an ostrich and hoping it can fly.

Microsoft failed in previous tablet efforts by trying to graft the desktop environment onto a touchscreen. Failed miserably, and not because of hardware immaturity. In contrast, Apple has succeeded immensely by discarding the desktop metaphor and embracing the touch environment exclusively. Microsoft is trying to straddle the two environments solely to prop up Windows, not because it's a better UX. This to me, dooms it to failure, just as Microsoft failed in its previous tablet ventures.
It is possible that they overpaid based on the success of Draw Something, but they could release another star app with the Omgpop team, or even improve their existing apps! I guess we'll find out later...
Rural Americans for Obama
'From this I get the distinct impression he really believed Microsoft wasn't doing anything wrong and things like bundling a browser with the OS were just "innovations";'

I can't tell from the quote what your stance on this is, but I think history vindicates the viewpoint you ascribed to Gates.

Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without an OS today? The idea is ridiculous. Doesn't that then make Gates/MS' decision in this area innovative and forward-looking?
iGoogle has been my homepage for some time and is my window into numerous google properties (gmail, calendar, etc). This is an unwelcome change.
Poker is far more about making risk reward calculations.

Chess is far more about pattern matching.

Starcraft is about planning a strategy then executing it on many many fronts at once.
I agree with you, until I start comparing the amount of heavy duty arts programming on the BBC.

So, on BBC radio 4 you'll have A day set aside for "Bloom's Day", heavily promoted before hand, with James Joyces' Ulysses newly dramatised and broadcast over five and a half hours, in seven slots from 9:00am to midnight; and the cross-promotional stuff.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jl7l9)

This is a considerable amount of time and money on a well known (but little read) book. And when you hear arts items on news programmes no-one stops to patronise the audience[1] yet anything that goes beyond very simple science on news is handled very gently, as if all the audience are idiots. I don't even mind that so much - but it's the lack of any programming at all that goes beyond the curriculum that a 15 year old would study that is problematic. Of course, there are notable exceptions, and I know that it'd be as bad or worse in other countries.

[1] They'll mention names of artists but not bother explaining any context; you're just expected to know that this person is a scupltor or has won some award or whatever; and you're expected to be aware of some of the main themes in their work.
A hilarious customer service response
We are working on alternate authentication. Would love to get your email address. You can send it to ritu@learningjar.com
Did you use any particular js lib to control the video on the players? Or was that part not js.

I ask this because I was doing a server/video player that syncs up to 20 slave audio players with the media, to allow for multilanguage, and did not find anything specific.
> you can't help but root for somebody like this.

I can. Dude left his wife three hundred miles away so he can live out of a car to work on his idiotic startup. "Moxie"? I'm sure that's something his second wife will be able to appreciate. In the meantime, I agree with "Herbert": he's a tool, and this moronic stunt is transparent and far from endearing.
What made Microsoft so predatory is that they wanted to dominate the market and squash any competitors, and drive everything into a Microsoft monoculture. Apple doesn't act in the same way, and only seems to care about profits and products rather than marketshare. So even if Apple does something that seems incredibly controlling, you don't have to worry, because you can always buy somebody else's product. Microsoft was trying to make it so you couldn't buy anybody else's product.
We call this corruption or perhaps incompetence here too. Where people from outside the US get the idea that we're all a bunch of blind, unthinking, flag waving yokels I do not know.
Smartest Man In Europe Predicts Catastrophe
I don't care what logos look like. I care about what products do. I also care about how the company treats its customers and developers.

That said, nobody put a Microsoft sticker on their car. Maybe Microsoft should think about that a little. The designs proposed by the article would most-definitely not have me even consider a sticker on my car (which has zero stickers, but that's another topic).
Thanks a lot! You aren't alone. I sat in the Stripe campfire room for many hours while developing the connectivity and that question was asked by a lot of different people during that time.
You have most of it.

More importantly: You always do X Y and Z in poker (many times), even if you will probably lose the current hand, because X Y and Z are all positive expectation, even if the current result of that particular instance turns out bad. This skill cannot be undersold in real life. It's the key to sales pitches, job interviews, getting raises, running departments, etc. It's the key to fairness to people who did something that got a poor result (but was a good way to do something), etc.
Or Self and JavaScript. And it calls Ruby a "hardware description language". I need to stop reading it, it's making me angry.
Case in point: Every time I post my project http://iwaat.com in a relevant HN comment I see a noticeable bump in the analytics graph for that day. Hopefully, I won't be noticing HN comment traffic for very much longer.
Is it routine for you to have `feelings` about Google, or what it's trying giZm0? We don't usually share feelings on in this forum.
I wanted to hijack a top comment to say what I will, but decided against it, just because I didn't expect this thread to have such divergent views.

This portfolio to me just fucking gets it. The design thinking going on here is incredible, in that it frames the challenge correctly and immediately, and then fills that gap really well. MS has for a long time had the vision, but the brand and feel of that vision has never matched. It results in the feeling that some boring and risk-averse engineers are running the marketing department. MS has no clear sense of self.

Web 2.0 and startups today focus and thrive on that sense of self, because it's the only way to stand out in a sea of Microsoft's, Oracle, Cisco, etc. Because of this, I feel like this new branding attempt resonates with a very specific crowd - young 20-something's like me. It's very clear to me the ones who are talking about lipstick and pigs in this thread are completely missing the point of this experiment. That's what design thinking and branding is all about.

Congratulations man, I can bet you a team full of marketing guys (whoever's left that is) are shaking in their boots right now. Not for the branding or design, but for what their branding is failing to do.

*edit - just food for thought for the forward thinking nature of this design, the FB thread I found this on is blowing up at a rate of a shit ton of likes and comments, all young 20 somethings who are really impressed.
A lot of people have left. But I imagine it would be hard to leave if you have a mortgage in a high-priced suburb that's flat or dropping in price.
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Here is an added bonus for my HN friends: I created a video showing exactly how I built (and released the source code) the Stripe Platform connection:

http://www.markhagan.me/Samples/Stripe_Platform_Authorizatio...
I'm not a huge Teddy Roosevelt fan, but I think his words fit this discussion quite well:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.