skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined."

revenue != profit

And thus the article follows the canonical narrative: a dividend paying company's stock price looks different from that of one which is focused on accumulating cash; a B2B company oriented company doesn't inspire the same loyalty among consumers as a consumer electronics company; and a CEO who is the second largest shareholder (first is Gates) doesn't knee jerk from quarter to quarter to the delight of Wall Street analysts like a typical hired gun.

Of course the biggest cliche is that Microsoft has failed to innovate. This despite creating two new UX paradigms - the ribbon and Metro - not just implementing a PARC based UI on a touch screen;* or developing the .NET framework and the development of its associated tool chain; or things which few people in the tech press ever think about like Windows Server HPC.

*If capacitive touch screen development is seen as a great leap forward by Microsoft's competitors, where does that put Kinect?
> I'm hoping to demonstrate that there can be a reasonable mode of disagreement

No. Some beliefs are so abhorrent that no reasonable mode of disagreement exists. You are wrong.

> and that someone can't immediately be considered stupid for failing to want to encourage homosexual behavior.*

I do not consider you stupid. I do consider you to be bigoted. There have been many intelligent bigots. They were wrong too.
What kind of car does he drive? Maybe it's a van. How many passengers are in it at the time? You need to know these things before you make blunt assumptions and statements like that. People can easily lean on the 100kg mark or higher. Now have a family of them, plus groceries or gear. Your C1 will have a driving weight of 1500kg in no time. For him, if he's driving a van, he might start pushing 8 people... 100kg each plus gear... we're looking at nearing an extra metric ton of weight.

All of that said, how many people are you carrying in your Citroen?
Educating them for what, though?

A lot of the MS technology stack makes sense in a world when you have a lot of individual servers scattered across companies. But speaking as a guy who still maintains a couple of physical servers of my own, I think that's dying. Ubiquitous good bandwidth means centrally managed services make much more sense.

I'd hate to discourage anybody from doing technical work, but about the last thing I'd recommend a student become today is an MS sysadmin. I think its career prospects are similar to COBOL developer: reasonable for people to keep going until they retire, but definitely not a growth industry with 40 years of solid prospects ahead.
Novell did something similar. They used to fire IIRC the 'bottom' 10% every year. This HBS article talks about the system: http://hbr.org/2001/05/leading-through-rough-times-an-interv... Interestingly, Eric Schmidt seems to have modified it a bit and seen that it wasn't working well.

"Incidentally, not all systemic changes work. I’ve also learned that certain management techniques can actually make things worse when applied to a distressed culture. For example, I had always worked in companies with yearly and quarterly employee ranking systems, in which people were divided into three groups: overperforming, performing, and underperforming. So not long after I came here, we started a ranking program that graded on a curve: 45% into the overperforming group, 50% into the performing group, and 5% into the underperforming group. I didn’t know—and certainly didn’t intend it this way—that if you got the lowest grade, it was presumed that you were about to be fired. We started getting hate mail from people who argued that there was no way to rank people who worked as a team. The ranking system exacerbated the culture of fear and proved to be such a huge retention and motivation issue that we were forced to stop it after a year. In its place, we introduced a modified ranking program that better reflected overall employee performance."
The benefit of this is we get something that is invaluable, discovery. We discover things that may have no practical application at all, but we discovered it, then someone might come along in 1, 100, 10000 years that has a use for it, but only because it's been discovered.

X-rays, electricity, penicillin we're all discoved with no practical application in mind.
We are having the very same experience. We signed our software with a code signing cert from a reputable issuer (DigiCert). We discovered that Norton 360 was automatically quarantining the downloaded installer and most users had no idea how retrieve it from quarantine. We got whitelisted and then released a bug-fix update and voila the our app started getting quarantined again. We are losing potential users and it have been damaging to our company!
Source code for the Zemra crimeware bot released
35 pages of forum reading later, it is observed by a forum poster (and quoted by an employee) that a total of 2 users have complained so far. Many more users report that it works fine under WINE, and a Blizzard employee reports that they did "extensive" testing as well.

So this seems to be "we were caught cheating, so we started a bunch of sensational forum threads about Linux and then submitted it to ArsTechnica".
Why did this simple review site sell for $600K?
I thought about this more after my comment. Yes, this is very true. Finding employee #1 is different from finding a co-founder but not by much, especially if you want them to stick around and work well with you. And founding a company with someone you are already friends with is I think much more common that founding with someone who you've just met.
most developers don't understand the concept of I/O.
The I/O speed is really important in terms of TTFB.
Most websites are hosted on SATA drives which have poor IO speed. Even if they are on RAID-10. The speed of CPU doesn't really matter here, unless your app does heavy CPU processing.
To speed up TTFB, only thing you can do is to cache/cache/cache, and possibly having a varnish in front of your web apps.
Also you'll see substantial boost in TTFB times if you switch over to something like RAID-10 SAS, and even more so if you switch to the newer drives like the SSD. I've seen Magento stores go from several seconds per load to almost varnish-cache level when placed on PCI-Express SSDs.
Please give me the supporting info (e.g. changes in CRT VS 2012 versus the one in VS 2010). What I have is the same story but related to Windows 2000 support in previous compilers, and I doubt there's any difference: at the moment they removed support Windows 2000 for those who bought expensive new Visual Studios, they in fact had the proper support properly implemented and used. The proof was that it was even delivered in WDK which used the same new compiler backends:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2484511/can-i-use-visual-...

http://kobyk.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/dynamically-linking-wi...

Up to now removal of support of earlier versions of Windows was never caused by technical limitations but only by "political" decisions. If you have different specific examples please provide them.
As long as Ballmer stays, Microsoft isn't going to move fast enough to respond to their existential threats - Google, Apple, Linux - and Windows.
Vertical Integration is the Future of Technology AND Publishing and Advertising
> The monetization model divorces payment from the direct beneficiary - that's the key takeaway.

No. Freemium divorces payment from SOME direct beneficiaries.

However, the total cost, and then some, is paid by other direct beneficiaries. Is your scheme any different?

Note that freemium doesn't always work. For example, a freemium automobile company is unlikely to work. Advertising supported "free to end user" automobiles won't work either.

So, how does your proposed model work? Be sure to explain when it works and when it doesn't. (If you claim that it works for every product/service, you're wrong.)
Its pretty fun to play with, honestly. Hasn't tried to kill me yet...
SEEKING WORK - Remote, will travel.

I am looking specifically for Node.js, MongoDB, AWS, and Puppet contract work, remote and part-time, but am available for all kinds of full-stack Web development and project management. I've found some great engagements here in the past.

Email and links in my profile. CV and references on request.
In education we call this 'norm referencing'. The highest scoring 10% get A, the next 15% down get a B and so on. In the UK, people have moved to 'criterion referencing' so certain performance criteria are set and if you reach those, then you get that grade.

Would the second practice, given sensible and negotiated targets work better?
Seems like it could appear to work in a growing, young company with rising stock value. If someone is genuinely good, but gets stack-ranked out of your group, it's probably not as hard to move to another, possibly new group, when the firm is growing.

But when the company is mature, and the stock is flat, and the headcount is under pressure...
Top 15 Most Useful Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
Jason Fried on Killing a Product
Tablets Are Leading To A ‘Less Paper’ But Not ‘Paperless’ Publishing World
Right between ALGOL 68 and C++.
For any game from a major league, you can go to the soccernet game summary and click on GameCast to see a heat map for any player. Here's Messi in the Barcelona 3 - 1 Real Madrid from December: http://i.imgur.com/XEvpW.jpg

(From http://soccernet.espn.go.com/gamecast?id=323887&cc=5901 )
"Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

HOLY SHIT that sounds like a bad idea! Who in the world would think that's a good idea. That's crazy.
I might be reading the blog wrong, but it seems he is using the MVC view (templates separated from the logic and sent to the user) and the user interface interchangeably. These are two very different things.

The interface the client uses is always going to be some sort of state transfer system, moving between different pieces of content and displaying elements to transfer between content.

Handling these views on the back end is an entirely different issue.

State machines are useful on the back end, but it can not be used between requests without causing headaches.

I have been experimenting with state machines in a node.js framework to handle asynchronous sub-views (https://github.com/Dashron/roads). It makes development incredibly simple, and breaks up the code so that you can have traditional, or single page apps with the same codebase.

I don't think a state machine would be useful at a higher level than this (in the backend) but I will put more thought into it.
Implants may improve therapy for neurological disorders
thanks for putting the tutorial together. looks like i have plans this weekend now :)
Drinking 3+ cups of coffee a day lowers risk of basal cell carcinoma by 20%
Thank you for being the hero that this thread needs. You're absolutely right, and your tone and bluntness is completely appropriate for the quality of this post.
It says that the company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington which is on Pacific Daylight Time.
SalesPortal Announces Marketing Analytics Dashboard for ROI Management
Entrepreneur Media continues to sue entrepreneurs who use the word entrepreneur
Ironic that open source using a Microsoft language can be so evil.

How can free operating systems create completely trusted, safe computing environments? What is the trade off between that ideal and Richard Stallman's four freedoms?
Banning Linux Users For Using Linux...
Before using it in a real project, it is obvious to do some research, isn't it?
So some questions and concerns arise, naturally. Regarding generics, I really don't like what Go offers instead [1].

By the way, creators themselves haven't eliminated the chance of adding generics in later versions of the language [2].

Also, I don't understand why not have destructors (deterministic, not the finalizer...) in many cases where currently `defer` is used.

I also don't like the trick you have to do for checking the interface integrity [3].

All in all, I have a sympathy for Go, lets see what will happen in 2.0.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6255720/making-generic-al...

[2] http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#generics

[3] http://golang.org/src/pkg/encoding/json/stream.go#L187
The books that Radically Chwnge Capitalism
Microsoft has never wanted ubiquitous computing; they've wanted ubiquitous licenses of Microsoft operating systems and applications.

Even when they've tried to behave well, people don't trust them, because of this.

I think the single best thing Microsoft ever did was bail out Apple, so they didn't have to go bankrupt.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/
The way they describe stack ranking is fundamentally wrong. Currently Windows is in calibration, where we stack rank and reward behaviors that are positive for the company. This is not done on a per team basis, but on a whole organization basis. Everyone at a given level is ranked against everyone at the same level, with the goal that those who do well will be rewarded-- not only monetarily but also in terms of their position within the company. This starts at the team level, where managers push for their reports and ICs to be recognized for their successes, and it follows all the way up the chain and across the company.

Stack ranking is not simply based on what you accomplished, but also how you did it. There are three main pillars: what you did, how you did it and how you showed growth during the timeframe/milestone.

There is no perfect system, but to be frank, the calibration and review system is pretty damn fair and consistent.
Valve uses stack ranking as well. Does Valve do anything different which makes them immune to the same company-ruining internal competition?
revenue != profit

There are estimates that the iPhone business does generate more profit than Microsoft as a whole.
This is just ridiculous. Microsoft is a powerful company that has simply foundered, like many before it. They've just never been able to understand (at a corporate level) the changing forces of the software industry. They remain entrenched (perhaps rightfully so) in Windows, which firmly anchors them in the PC era.

Comparatively, Apple has embraced the post-PC era, and has reinvented themselves as a consumer electronics company. Remember that in the late 90s, Apple was trying to make it as a PC manufacturer as well, and only at the brink of failure were they able to recognize that they had to pivot. Microsoft still makes too much money via the PC-oriented Windows-based business model, so they haven't been forced to reinvent themselves.

Also, for the installed hardware base, Windows is and has always been the most consumer-friendly operating system on the market. It's certainly not perfect, and it might not suit power users, but it more than serves its purpose.
Email aliases are not limited to gmail - most MTAs (Postfix, sendmail, etc) have allowed '+' aliases for years now.

I think it's bad advice to just simply filter those out - your customers may be using them to filter emails, track the usage of their email address, etc. Restricting what you think is a valid email address, rather than what I type in, is a pretty assholish move.

On top of all that, it simply won't stop spammers.
It's unlikely, as mortgages (and debt in general) are very unpopular in China. It's currently not possible to even get a mortgage. Chinese ghost towns are, for the vast majority, bought and paid for by rich speculators in cash.

Not to say speculation isn't trouble, but theirs isn't built on debt (as was ours).
Both Accenture and UBS do the same thing. I never liked it, myself, for the reasons cited in the article. This type of performance system means it's far more important to be good at schmoozing than to be good at working.
U.S. Sales Ban on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to Remain in Effect
this is basically the Rube Goldberg machine of robotics; which is cool in its own right.
I see no reason not to wait to SEE what the iPhone 5 is at least. It's just a couple months.
base+extension@domain type mail addresses are incredibly useful for legitimate people. For starters, they can be used to track who is leaking your personal information out.

So I hope this alarmist note does not prompt anyone into banning the "+extension" email addresses.
Coming up with applications of the Higgs Boson can make it easier to discover. If the thing works, that indicates that the theory is correct.
Reading between the lines from both the posted note and their persistent failure to provide correct statuses: the ops guys over there are in full CYA desperation mode somewhere around 100% of the time, and a culture of 'it wasn't me', fuelled either by job fear, or promotion fear, or fear of being noticed by bezos, is in full bloom.
Yep. It's MVC with eventing (often found in most UI frameworks anyway). Definitely fits within the broad paradigm of MVC.
...
Those that refuse to ditch iOS aren't doing so because they'll miss out on potential customers, it's because they like the idea of building apps for the most popular phone on the market, despite the crap they have to put up with.
...

Trying to assess peoples motivations is unlikely to be accurate or useful.
This is pretty much the norm in large, entrenched companies like Microsoft. It's the reason why so much innovation comes largely from startups and small businesses.
I've always enjoyed seeing what other startups choose for their stack. With your thoughts on heroku, what do you think about the new Google Cloud aimed at competing with AWS?
I'm engaging in what is commonly known as using one's imagination to make educated guesses at the possible electronic devices within an average motor vehicle (you know, that thing with wheels on it) where a real time clock susceptible to wraparound or overflow might be found, thus resulting in potential malfunction, or in plainer words, "the car won't start, the tuner won't play music, the GPS won't get a signal, this thing is about as useful as a brick".
> Of course the biggest cliche is that Microsoft has failed to innovate. This despite creating two new UX paradigms - the ribbon and Metro - not just implementing a PARC based UI on a touch screen

"Innovation" != "Different Idea".

I'm sure some people like Ribbon or Metro, but I haven't met any; I've been looking for WP7 "in the wild", and over the last 6 months found exactly one.

Intel innovated with the Itanium - but that wasn't useful innovation.

> where does that put Kinect?

In the PrimeSense / 3DV innovation camp. Yes, MS did bring it to the masses. But they didn't get the thing working themselves - they licensed from one innovator, and bought (and closed down) the other, shutting everyone else out of that market for a while.

Personally, I think Metro and Ribbon are both from the same design school: They look beautiful when you look at someone else using them, but they actually get in the way when you're trying to get things done. I've spent an hour playing with a Metro based WP7 to see what it's about; I feel that their "throw all other tiles, then replace the one you pressed" wastes time. I know what I pressed - let me get there.
You can change the license of derivative works, even if you do not hold the copyright on the original code.
Hah, I suppose so. The hardest part for me was getting the WiFi module to work - it was very finicky...
Hm, what if there is an error in processing and you've already sent the "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" and started streaming output? You're better off utilizing caching and other optimization based on profiling.
> Reject email addresses containing unusual symbols like “+”

No, please do not do this. It's a very useful feature for properly sorting email from multiple sources, and lets you know easily what providers are selling your information (thus letting you selectively block those providers).

Not to mention that this will do nothing to spammers, other than minorly inconvenience them.
I understand (somewhat) and agree fully with the value of this research. (Great specifics by the way.) I am hearing from you that we have no idea what we will discover, but it could be anything and likely something really cool.

The question I have is really how it was explained to politicians and decision makers who are not scientific. Was it really, "with this research we could discover anything from teleportation to a better way to make toasters", or was it something more specific?

I currently see our governments doing everything they can to limit discovery and creativity because they don't understand basic science or the Internet. It is interesting and heartening to me that a project like this currently exists and is mostly not questioned.
> One way is to find particles that the model predicts. If they are found then we know that the standard model is in fact correct.

Actually, finding those particles doesn't tell us that the standard model is correct. Finding those particles just tells us that it doesn't have some specific errors.

One difference between science and math is that you can't prove anything "correct" in science.
Executives who are exceptional at chess
We chose our basis because it is convenient. It's called a Fock space[1]. You can choose any basis you want, the equations of motion derived from the Lagrangian will tell you how any wavefunction evolves, independently from your choice of basis.

The number of waveforms isn't finite by the way. There's a fundamental waveform for every momentum (which can be any real number) and for every number of particles (which must be a positive integer).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fock_space
how about 'the evidence on display in front of us'?
Well, given how the DOJ treated MS, it is pretty clear that there was very little it could do in terms of integrating experiences without getting sued. Bundle a browser in your OS, get sued. Bundle a media player in your OS? Get sued. But Microsoft is in the middle of a huge culture shift, and it is doing things that are new, bold and targeted, unlike any company in the industry. Google is shooting blanks in every direction, hoping something won't just be a flash in the pan. Apple is cold and consistent, but given their record and how they treat developers, I would be surprised if they don't overplay their hand again.
Amazon, on the other hand, is pretty awesome. Besides being a horrible company to work for, from all reports I have heard, they execute hard, fast and generally pretty well.
IBM does something similar as well.
Idea: A Protocol to Open Files Using Web Applications
Kim Dotcom for the rest of us.
What a Japanese Tea Ceremony Taught Me about Steve Jobs