skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very unlikely that iPhone 5 will be able to make my coffee in the morning and seeing as this is probably the only way to deter me from the "real-OS" functionality and customization abilities of Android I don't see a reason to wait for iPhone 5. Yes it'll have great specs and it will look sexy but in the end it's just another iOS device.

Full disclosure: I bought a used Galaxy Nexus a few weeks ago and after extensive use (including a week-long vacation with it in a city I've never been to before) I am not looking back.
Many thanks Roger, that's all super-helpful!
LearningJar- Learn Skills Informally
I would love to get feedback on my education technology startup from the HN community. Its helping people gain employable skills informally and prove what they have learned.
It sure is interesting to watch armchair HN give commentary on things they only have second-hand knowledge of, especially when your team just went through calibration 4 days ago and you got an inside look on how not-big-a-deal it was.
Two points:

* The difference between Macintosh 1984 and the Alto is bigger than the difference between before and after Ribbon. The difference between Macintosh 1984 and Macintosh 2012 even more so, to say nothing of the gap between Macintosh and iOS. Microsoft almost always followed Apple's lead in UI design though.

* Kinect is a game controller. There's no Kinect UI paradigm yet, certainly not the way multitouch is a UI paradigm over capacitive touchscreens. Again, the gap between mouse and Macintosh is at least as big as the gap between capacitive touchscreen and iPhone.
Weren't they trying to charge for this on itunes?
Thank you. It's my first posting, though my 2nd time in the last year that I've tried to post. The first time, HN automatically told me my link had been posted before, so I assumed if the link had already been submitted, I would be informed by HN's algorithm.
He's also dropped the trolling: http://teddziuba.com/post/24585610978/starting-over
There is a big difference between constructive criticism and vitriolic platform wars that you seem to keep trying to instigate.

Again, how is MS relevant to this discussion?
I have not localized the app itself. I feel like that is a lot of work for one person to maintain.

However, I have localized the App Store title, description, and keywords to as many markets as possible. I use Google Translate and my best judgement. Mostly, I just translate the word "piano" into different languages, to improve search. See my German page: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/tiny-piano/id477014214

This has had a positive impact on sales in Germany, Japan, and Korea.
This seems like a good place to mention the original stack-ranking critic, Mini-Microsoft (still going!):

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2004/07/microsoft-stack-rank-as...
Samantha Brick – The Daily Mail’s Linkbait Masterclass
Samantha Brick's recent exposure online via The Daily Mail was a masterclass in how bad publicity can give you amazing linkbait that benefits everyone involved.
the power of the interwebz
Yes but why you need to have a wave function in the first place? Why can't we just have particles with a single state?
Affero GPL are missing. And FDL. Submitted them.
Have they announced the price of a new copy? Would be nice if it was similarly priced.
India's First Freelance Marketplace
besides the realtime already mentioned it also has custom and automatic alerts. These 2 features are not available through the Google Analytics API so other developers can't implement it.
This is a fairly common practice across many relatively successful organizations. In addition to the other companies mentioned in this thread,I believe McKinsey consulting also takes a similar approach.

Granted, successful does not necessarily imply they are innovative. This management strategy may be more effective in more sedate and established industries where adhering to best practices may be more important than charting new courses.

If anything, this would seem to be a cautionary tale to tech startups that may be tempted to hastily implement traditional MBA'esque management styles. One size certainly does not fit all.
Doesn't that seem like spending an awful lot of time and effort on something completely internal?
Wow, thanks, I didn't know that.

Its kind of hard to swallow (but Jobs-ish character type, of course) to see Microsoft rescuing them, and years later seeing both Jobs and Gates sitting next to each other and Jobs bashing Gates like he's a dirt.
Would be interested in hearing stock option philosophy on first hire. (how much, vest schedule, etc)
Facebook IPO hangover not over yet
I believe GE does also. If these kind of companies are employing the same system with better results, would this imply that the theory behind stack ranking is not the problem?
18 miles = 28.968192 kilometers
I'm interested in hearing more about awesome companies in NZ. I've been interested in getting out there for a couple years now.
Big Dreams Require Big Thinkers
Does anyone know why they have these small balconies below the windows? Never seen this before.
Other than the claim that perhaps radical or unpopular art might inspire further art creation or bring joy to a small group who desire this kind of art, which I suppose has some value, what value does NEA funded art have to society as a whole? I certainly don't know anyone who benefits from it, which makes it nothing at all like research.
> Executives of banks and mortgage companies engaged in fraudulent practices that led to the financial crisis.

At least some of these practices were "encouraged" if not mandated by govt regulators. Are you planning to punish them? If not, what's the justification for punishing the folks following their orders?
If you live in Seattle you'll see WP7 phones in the wild. They're all owned by Microsoft employees however.
This has nothi...

Oh, everyone else already covered it.
The original analysis was posted and commented here on HN.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091199
To me, he went from being a "victim that is also a douchebag" when he seems to be doomed to "antihero" as soon he's started winning.

That being said, I don't have any problem with the services that megaupload is providing even if it tremendously anger copyright holders.
> We anticipate that, having overcome the corrosion difficulty

Given that it's essentially a closed system of (quality verifiable) air and water, where is the corrosion coming from? and how did you guys address that?
Google also stack-ranks.
This is prone to false positives. I never return voicemails that are left by recruiters doing a background check. It's just a single sample point, but I'm sure there are others.
QR Code Fatigue
Reminds me of the article a short while ago about the startup culture of the Bing team that lost its momentum because Microsoft tossed a bunch of managers and PM's at it. Or rather, Microsoft crippled Bing with bureaucracy.
Given his past and the megaupload business model, you have to fuck up pretty badly to turn Kim into this much of a hero.

If Hollywood had chased a civil case against him, they would have almost certainly won it and shut down his business, which would have then paved the way for them to pursue a criminal investigation (although I am far from convinced that he has done anything explicitly illegal as opposed to merely unlawful).

This way round it looks as though they could lose badly on all counts and make themselves look like malicious and incompetent fools in the process while simultaneously souring US relationships with their political allies.

Perhaps they are just malicious and incompetent fools however. It would certainly seem to be the simplest explanation for the current situation.
What's To Love About C?
An eager functional language would probably die here, but it seems like a fine fit for a lazy one: compose a list of the other series/events as you scan.
Only by degrees.
Let’s just solve the file format problem
Bill Gates Explains Why Microsoft Had To Punch Its PC Partners In The Guts
Like the ones that they introduced to fix array[key_without_quotes] where key_without_quotes was mapped to a string if it was not a defined constant and a NOTICE was issued? The first thing everyone did was turn off E_NOTICE since practically all code emitted that notice. It took years until you could run apps with E_NOTICE turned on :)
> Trying to assess peoples motivations is unlikely to be accurate or useful.
I see. I have to apologize, it totally went over my head you were talking about cars considered classic in 2038, not the current day. Whoosh.
Plain and simple this article seems like it was written 3-5 years ago. With the recent things Microsoft has been coming out with (Kinect, WP7, WP8, Win8, Surface, New xbox, etc.) that has generated genuine interest...are we really saying that this company is dead?

Some good points are made in this article, but it gives off a strong vibe of bitter employees who got bad reviews.

Also:

>"Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined."

uh, maybe but revenue != profit. I like the closing on this post: http://dcurt.is/steve-ballmers-microsoft

"we should not forget this very consistently true fact: Microsoft makes around $5.5 billion every three months. In pure profit."
Cervantes had to deal with a ripoff of Don Quixote while he was writing the second part of Don Quixote, after publishing part I. It even makes up part of the plot of part II.

Another author published what they claimed to be part II.

It's a different form of IP infringement than simple unauthorized duplication of a work, but it's been around for a long time.
We already have a way to do this with hydrophones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
He has a good point. But I actually believe <no one> knows how to remove the GIL. The dev's don't want to admit it, and prefer to make up explanations, but I don't think anyone can come up with a way to remove it.

Guido's been open to solutions for a long time IIRC he just wants it not to slow down the single threaded case. And no one has put forward anything.
> that's it never had an original idea

And now I can ignore you.
> tell them that you may have to fire them or that they may be let go through not fault of their own

This is really great advice. If there's one thing almost as good as being in rock-solid employment, it's having a clear and accurate view on what the stability of your employment position is.
A refreshing new player in the education and skill-development field. I'm definitely keeping and eye on this one and it's my first stop for new skills I want to improve.
Same reason so many people are at the post office at midnight on April 15th filing their tax returns.

Deadlines work.
His other post on matching using derivatives is very interesting: http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-regular-exp...
Microsoft didn't "bail out" Apple--Apple by 1997 was solvent and profitable. The immediate cash flow problem was solved by Gil Amelio and Fred Anderson a year before. The truce between Apple and Microsoft had more to do with Apple focusing on the future and abandoning several frankly promising legal claims against Microsoft, including Microsoft's outright theft of the QuickTime source code. Promising to sell Microsoft Office for Mac was more important than the $150 million.
Yes, a (hypothetical) "complete rollback" would involve replacing removed data. Sure, data privacy would be a concern, but it's beside the point that rolling this back would necessitate un-overwriting.
State machines are this neat thing they teach you in freshman Computer Engineering courses, but I've met a lot of CS or SE graduates who have no idea, which is too bad--they're a useful tool. Anyone who doesn't know state machines should definitely read up on them.
I think the problem isn't the population being in debt, because, as you mention, in China, most people pay cash as debt is anathema for most indivs. On the other hand, one or the main forces behind the construction is local government revenue. Local govt's raise funds through land leasing and selling. In order to remain solvent they enter into these real estate deals, if they are successful, they do well, if things go south, they are in debt --so there is the danger lots of local (CN) gov'ts being insolvent.
I've recently have started using Balanced Payments. It is by far the best marketplace payments processor ever however it is never covered by anyone in the tech media.

There are lots of gems out there, I wish TC and others would stop the bullshit and just write about the best start ups not just the ones funded or founded by rock stars.
Shy physicists explain dating and relationships in extremely roundabout way.
Michael Phelps and Stephanie Rice - kiss picture proof?(Photos)
When the cap suits, wear it - although not if you're trying to keep your identification secret although snogging the world's best Olympian.
We need a "dislike" button first...
Great one ! Thanks a lot !! Could you tell me how to connect some Input device like UI Screen with Arduino and get touch inout from it? Any links will be helpful!!
Mmm, all the verbosity of java with all the headaches of sh...
Why rank the employees at all though? What good does it do to tell someone that they're worse than everyone else?

It is to your advantage to make your coworkers look bad, and that sucks. Thankfully, people are generally pretty good and don't do this too much, but I can see it creating a very toxic work environment.
I worked at Andersen Consulting (which is now Accenture) for long enough to be inside the banding process as well as subject to it and actually thought that the ranking system worked pretty well -- in a consulting company.

To begin with, it didn't work the way described in the article (does Microsoft's system actually work that way? if so -- ugh). There were five bands, and the "you get fired" band didn't generally get anyone assigned to it. Furthermore, the percentages in each band were somewhat flexible and applied across the organization, not to any one group of people. It was quite possible for an effective team to all be band 1 and 2. (But then, AC didn't really have fixed teams.)

Of the four non "you're fired" bands, 1 was excellent, 2 good, 3 adequate, 4 was improve or leave. (I don't think we were even required to assign any band 4s.)

But a consulting company is very different from a product company. A consulting company actually WANTS a large proportion of its workforce to leave within a certain time because ultimately it's a pyramid scheme. Only 10% of people who join get to associate partner (or whatever) level and you need to advance at a certain rate or you'll be ticked off, so you need to shed 90% of people before they've lasted X years or you're screwed.

A product company needs people with deep technical skills to hang around. It's one thing to use "up or out" to drive your sales force (and the upper echelons of a consulting company are salesmen) and quite another to do this to your deep technical people.

So it's a misapplication of a management theory and not an intrinsically bad management theory.
If, as described elsewhere, the overwriting is due to using a specific and common API, the only unintended consequence is user reaction. No need to test for every possibility there.
> Every programmer ought to have the experience of implementing a tool for matching regular expressions from scratch.

Umm... I'm sure it's fascinating, but I've really got better things to do with my time, which is why I use RegExs in the first place :)
It depends whether they let their own IT guys look at the technology in question. They're more likely to be influenced by snazzy tech (as long as they think they understand it), than by any goodness in the business approach.
Linux Gamers Banned From Diablo III Servers
The first question I can't answer, but the second question is easy: talk to a lawyer. Only your lawyer can tell you what parts of the agreement are important to you.
"Mass", as referred to by physicists is what may be known to others as "rest mass" or "invariant mass". An electron and a positron both have rest-mass. (Think of it as a fundamental property, like charge.) When they collide, the result is two photons that no longer have rest-mass.

It is important to note that gravity affects energy (mass-energy). This is why a compressed spring weighs more than the same spring uncompressed. A spinning ball weighs more than the same ball when it is stationary because there is more energy.

It's an important but subtle distinction that even a lot of physics professors don't quite grasp. Matt Strassler has some very good explanations of it on his page.
And WP8 jetisons compatibility with WP7...

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/arch...
> Who in the world would think that's a good idea.

Jack Welch, AFAIK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
Semi-tangent: Are there startups who do work like this, analyzing sports games or developing technology for sports (other than fitness trackers)? I'd be interested in learning more about them if so.
Some may suggest to convert the email address into it's base form and store it in an extra field. So mike+extra@gmail.com would become mike@gmail.com. Use the extra field to block any new signups that match an existing base address. But this has a high chance of blocking valid email addresses. Different email providers allow different aliases: plus, hyphen, dot, equals. That, combined without knowing which each email service a domain is using, makes this method very difficult to get right.
> I currently see our governments doing everything they can to limit discovery and creativity because they don't understand basic science or the Internet.

The truth is that it's easier for politicians to buy votes with handouts than it is for them to fund research in the hopes that an enlightened public will appreciate them for their foresight. Looks like they're correct... unfortunately.
It doesn't work. Google Instant fails to work even after I added the suggested fix...

{google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:searchFieldTrialParameter}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s
I'm guessing it's just superficial decoration, as there is no door to make it useful as balcony.
Taxing externalities is, of course, a good idea, and key to any functioning system of property rights.

I don't believe they should be used for revenues, because once you do that, it misplaces the incentive: now the government makes more revenue per unit externality. So I favor a flat rebate for all externality taxes.
Because complex algorithms can reveal information that isn't immediately obvious from basic stats, let alone "gut feelings" that you get from merely watching a game. This type of thinking is what leads to disparities between who the best players actually are and who the fans think the best players are (see: baseball All-Star voting).
Going from a 3.5" screen to a 4.3" screen has actually been somewhat the bane of my existence. Whereas my old phone (original Motorola Droid) was a breeze to use single-handedly, my new phone (HTC Rezound) is miserable. I am constantly having to reposition the phone in my hand to reach the far corners of the screen. Using the phone with two hands mitigates the problem, but only because I can then hold the phone with one hand as the other stretches.

Being able to view more is nice, but I am not yet convinced that it makes up for the significant decrease in usability. YMMV of course, but either way I think the increase in screen size is an interesting trend for an OS [0] spearheaded by someone affectionate toward one-handed use [1].

[0] Not that Google controls device dimensions for most devices, though I imagine they have some say in the Nexus phones.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/andy-rubin-on-multitouch-...
I can't stress enough the truth in what he says about ongoing maintenance costs being higher when launching a site with separate codebases for different screen sizes. This is really what sells responsive sites in my opinion: Focus.

Have two versions of your site? When you integrate a new feature you have two sets of problems. Two sets of tests. Two sets of, well... everything.

This is almost doubly so when it comes to content strategy. With two versions of a site it's often been my experience that one or the other (usually mobile, but I expect that to change) starts to count as little more than an afterthought and tends to degrade over time. A single responsive codebase really forces a lot of tough content questions to be asked and allows a simpler path for those problems to be solved.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't do what's best for the project. A somewhat hybrid example is what NPR has done with their native / web app ecosystem. Their content is often being pulled from a single data store and brought into different presentation layers (native mobile apps on devices, HTML on the web) as needed.
They used this as the point for why Microsoft has fallen behind. The former developer says, "I was too concerned with appeasing my manager's when I should have been concerned with being a better engineer."

But really? Is that why Microsoft has fallen by the wayside (realtively)? Because they don't have good enough engineers?

I disagree. I think they have a wealth of talented engineers.

What they need(ed) are people with vision, a deep understanding of the future of consumer electronics and computing, and a way to execute on that vision. They need to deliver short, medium and long-term products that feed their vision. They need to show people the future of the industry instead of lagging behind it.

Engineering is a crucial component in that, but it's only part of the story IMHO.
Stack ranking is equivalent to having a finite bonus pool, or having Gold, Silver and Bronze in the Olympics. Yeah the 4th place finisher is an amazing athlete, but there are only three medals.

Suppose you are a manager who manages 5 employees. If you have $100K to give out as bonuses, you could just divide it up equally. Over time employees would come to expect to get their bonus and it would cease to be a motivator.

While stack ranking imposes a bit of an assumption about the distribution of effort/merit on a team, it's also intended to foster spirited competition for the top spots, much like the medal system used in the olympics.

If you are managing a meritocracy and the rules of the game are known, nobody will begrudge someone else getting a bigger bonus. Many workers idealize working on a team where they are not the strongest, so that they can learn from others.

The point is that it's not just about rewarding people, its about rewarding people for the kind of significant contributions to the team that make a business difference. If managers are letting it get political and it turns into a BS metric, then that's evidence of a larger management problem than a problem with the particular distribution of bonuses entailed by the program.

One could argue that any bonus that is uncertain has the potential to alienate the employee if it is not earned. The converse would be to give all employees motivational bonuses, or, in other words, not to give bonuses but to rename some of the guaranteed compensation "bonus" when it's actually just salary.

If a corporate culture is so backward that the genius in the next cube getting a bonus is viewed as a bad thing, then it's probably time to think about how/why bonuses (or the equivalent) are given in a smaller business where the bonus comes in the form of options being worth something, etc.
Google releases Chrome extension to debug Angular applications
Oh, and world hunger the next month.
Wow. That reminds me of A Message to Garcia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Message_to_Garcia and http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm
At first glance, the site seems to be nothing more than an aggregator of tutorials. If there's a differentiating factor, I'm not seeing it.