skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At this point, I think Google should have more worries about antitrust. Google is very aggressive about bundling G+ with everything. I didn't want to get on it, but I was on gmail, Youtube, and a few of their other products, and they stopped working well without it. Once I was on it, there is huge social pressure to use it.

Google Chat, I didn't want, but it was integrated into gmail. Suddenly, I'd have chats from friends pop up as I was working. I presume there's some way to unbundle, but at this point, it's too late.

List keeps going. Google is crushing competitors not by building better products, but by using search to steer them there, and the rest of their chain to force users into them.

Google's motto seems to have changed from indexing and organizing the world's information to hoarding, organizing, and locking down the world's information.

Like Microsoft, they're also getting less and less competent. 6 years ago, their software was phenomenal. Today, it's kind of below average -- they've had a huge brain drain to startups, Facebook, and other places (except for Google X, which seems to be poaching quite well).

It's not as bad as Microsoft in it's prime, but it's getting there. I think in a year or two, they'll actually be worse.
Well, most of those webapps will likely navigate/open external websites.

I would love to have a hacker news window by default, so that external links i open there are nicely managed within the hackers news app.

So, the tab bar is a plus, if you ask me. The address bar and the new tab icon, should be removed though. Better yet, the new tab icon, should open he base url, or some other logical url: for gmail it could be a compose windows, for example.

And "mozilla firefox" should not be part of the window title. Other than that, actually hiding the fact its a browser is not really usefull. The tab bar, the menu .. No reason to remove those by default.

But i suspect, these apps are running in their own profile, and it is firefox, so we could always tweak the chrome ourselves.
"Using cloud based apps may affect your privacy but that is independent of this."
Yes, you're probably right. But will ubuntu be developing code for specific apps like gmail and twitter or will that be codded by the web app developers? If it's the former than you'll probably not have many choices.
Forbes quality is awful. I suspect it is auto generated using some huge n-gram corpus that generates random garbage.
It would be great to be able to easily and privately install the server part of the webapp. My hope by seeing the title is that canonical would have come with a system to do that.
It's not a new idea, but I think it is finally the idea's time. There was Prism, and there's FluidApp for OS X. There was also MS's active desktop as others have pointed out.
Counter-examples aplenty.. Ma Bell begets today's AT&T/Verizon duopoly. Standard Oil begets 7 of the world's largest companies after Apple.
Does taste mean not being able to understand what the aQuantive writedown is about?

Also, a mass produced phone built in China and sold in Walmart is a lot of things, but tasteful it is not.
If there's no equivalent work around it's not portable - simple as that. Proprietary hooks and APIs aren't evil, but suggesting developing for Metro is "open" and portable is wrong.

Since you've mentioned it, Mozilla isn't touting to use XUL for "open" cross-browser apps - although XUL itself, unlike anything Metro, is open source and does run cross-platform. Mozilla is even deprecating the use of XUL for its new Firefox OS (Boot to Gecko) in favor of using pure HTML5 instead. Maybe MS can work together with Mozilla and come up with a common API?
Carly Fiorina. She did the same thing to HP, very differently. Cut quality. Cut R&D. Cut support. Cut service. Slightly lower prices, while your reputation is still sky-high. Outsource anything that can be done cheaper not in-house. Scale back benefits and anything that costs money. Have layoffs anywhere that doesn't produce short-term revenue.

Profits soar. Share prices soar. A few years later, as reputation catches up with quality and support, as there are no new products in the R&D pipeline, and as you have no core competencies, and as your best employees leave, the company tanks.

You walk of with a ton of cash from early-year bonuses.
What are the use cases for RequireJS vs. Yepnope vs. LABjs?
R&D money. Most of the $5M will go to manufacturing the consoles they've pre-sold.
Dwarfed by hosting costs? There is tons of shared hosting options in the $50/year range which are quite usable for lots of purposes.
Several years ago I was a programmer for a small gaming firm. I spent 3 weeks working closely with the producer at our publisher and one of the tricks he told me about in their QA process was they they would hedge their costs by submitting their games to MS before they had finished internal QA. This would essentially allow them to obtain free QA time from a very large external group. (console QA is usually better than PC, so a multi-platform release would push the xbox version first to maximize the effect.) I think it came up because the certification fees for releasing on the 360 were just being raised to free first check, $40,000 each time there-after.
With these kind of common-sense oversights, I often wonder if many web reporters actually read the shit they shovel out.
At least when patches cost $40k, you have an incentive to make a really, really solid first release. I wonder if it leads to less buggy software in general? (obviously this is kind of a counterexample to that...)
That depends on what you're optimizing for. If you care about making your code smaller (which reduces the occurrence of bugs), making it more readable, etc., and performance isn't much of an issue, then it probably is a win. If you care about getting maximum performance... well, then, you need to get a good knowledge of the target system's performance characteristics and how language features are implemented in order to decide if it's a win or not (or, y'know, just profile the two options, I guess); it's entirely possible that a string of pointer dereferences might turn out to actually be faster than a conditional branch anyway.
New Center for Impact and Innovation in Seattle
I think you're being short-sighted. There's nothing inheritantly different about mobile that prevents web apps running as well as they do on the desktop. You are aware that on the desktop JavaScript engines like V8 can keep up with any garbage-collected language, right? There are a few reasons why things are progressing slower on mobile, among them:

1) There is very little browser competition on mobile. Users are either unaware of or don't see the benefit to downloading an alternate browser, and as a result the OS vendors have less of an incentive to improve their browser rapidly. On the desktop browsers like Firefox and Chrome release a new version every few weeks, whereas on mobile the OS vendors release once or a twice a year.

2) The JS engines haven't been optimized for ARM as heavily as x86. We'll get there though.

These are very much short-term problems. And despite that, you can write performant mobile web-apps today. If you have an iOS device you should try out the game X-Type: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2012/06/x-type-making-of which is written by a fellow HNer. It is extremely snappy, even when played without the assistance of Nitro.
I also try to not use IB most of the time, but especially if you are building not so custom designs, IB really increase the productivity and keep the code clean.
the possibility that Schmidt the man actually believes that Bing is competitive with Google

From a results-based perspective, it more-or-less is. But actually capturing the market is hard to imagine. Search engines in general seem to be reaching the limits of filtering 5 billion pages based on 2 or 3 word queries.
Hello from a libc-free world (Part 1)
I think everyone missed the point: the lettuce clearly is as rigid as cardboard.
Set up a sign up sheet and potential dates and times. http://doodle.com/
Palo Alto Network raise IPO price two times to $42 per share
I agree. It's engineering. There's a difference between launching a spacecraft and use it to do something no one has done before and building a 50km long bridge. Both are incredibly hard and expensive, but one of them is "only" engineering, the other has science as well.

There's no such thing as working in "tech". You are always working in "tech", whether it is using Excel or WebGL. When newspapers call the latter "tech", what they really mean is "new tech".

Programming a 3D multiplayer game in a browser is a re-combination of existing technologies, and therefore not "new tech". (Though of course, new, compared to Excel, but only by a few years.)
Greylock's Josh Elman discusses types of "growth" in consumer web products
PhoneGap, Mobile Safari, window.external.Notify, window.sidebar in Firefox but not Opera, you get the idea.
I feel like article actually hurts the startup's hiring prospects going forward. I find myself actively trying to forget those sentences I just consumed.
the left has Colbert -- who a quantifiable number of people from the right feel is an actual conservative
Technically accurate, but the headline is misleading. The loss was because of a non-cash write-off of a transaction made a few years ago (2007-aQuantive).

Microsoft's core businesses, especially Office, are humming along. The franchise is pretty strong and the overall company is a cash generating beast.
Google has one advantage, which is that they have a history of being mediocre at the business game but make great products. Microsoft was great in its heyday at the business game but makes mediocre products. This is an era of technology when a lot of the best things really are free (e.g. PostgreSQL, the best relational database, is open source) and Google is way better adapted to that environment.

It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.
Fab Raised $105M IaMA on Reddit
if statements are nearly always bad, because they don't communicate anything and they make the execution flow opaque. Will this method do what it says it will? Who knows! Will this statement be executed? Well, unless some condition is met along the way! Sometimes they are necessary, as in guard clauses, but I find avoiding them as much as possible leads to far more maintainable code.

If, and only if, my code is too slow is your concern relevant. That happens so rarely I find it not worth spending time on.
And Boot to Gecko will no doubt use lots of Firefox OS specific stuff just as WebOS does. I'm not defending Windows 8, I'm just pointing out that it's reasonable to use a language (JavaScript) to call out to 3rd party APIs.
I have an iPad and web apps suck on it too. What is your benchmark for good performance? I'm being serious as I'd love to be able to have a legitimate mobile outlet for high performance web applications.
I hate to nitpick, but that choice of background music strikes me as rather.. poor.
I'd love to move away from Oracle to Postgres, I really would. I'm trying to. But for massive amounts of data the partitioning and some other features of Oracle just work better. The partitioning is a huge thing, especially for our data which is partitioned by week then organized according to a hierarchical triangular mesh with bitmapped indexes. This works so well for us (at 8 billion rows) it's silly. MySQL couldn't do this and hacking this into Postgres was sloppy. Stored procedures in Oracle work pretty good as well (especially because of shared memory), but I'm trying to eliminate them as much as possible to try to accommodate other people.

I'm quick to complain about Oracle (especially the fucking cost based optimizer and how it falls back to retarded hash joins for me frequently, leading me to add hints, rewrite SQL or run the tuning advisor), but for it's faults, it does some things pretty well.

That being said, I'm wholeheartedly rooting for Postgres.
Is that supposed to be a good thing? I always found that style extremely hard to follow.
Everything in code is somewhere else, and you get there with a method call

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oun5gvDAU&feature=playe...
$100-200 is a great spot for small e-commerce businesses to target in general. No faffing about with tiny margins on a $5 transaction, no chasing overly-general markets to make up the transaction volume you need to stay alive.

For Kickstarter projects, maybe your low-denomination tier is more about expanding your marketing reach than it is about the money it raises directly.
Historically, technically minded folks have been exploited by business minded folks far more frequently than the other way around. While the most recent bend towards "engineer supremacy" may be objectively unhealthy, in the overall scheme of things, I think it is a positive development that will eventually lead us to a more balanced frame of mind than before the engineer supremacy phase started.

(and this is coming from a business side guy)
The complaint that MySQL is by default loosey-goosey with your data is valid, but it's an easy default to change. Here is what happens when you run some of the commands shown in that 'Why Not MySQL?' video on a sanely configured MySQL system by setting SQL_MODE to TRADITIONAL. This mode also allows you to not have dates with zeroes, etc.

mysql> alter table test change column my_money my_money decimal(2,0);
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.03 sec)
Records: 2 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> insert into test values (4,'bar', 100);
ERROR 1264 (22003): Out of range value adjusted for column 'my_money' at row 1
It's not clear to me that the figure would be the same for every developer and every circumstance. In any case, I'm sure Tim is a great guy but it would be nice if someone (anyone who is writing on this) would research it a little for confirmation.
Snipt Pro
What tool is he using to do the postgres part of that video?
I've been looking for a decent postgres gui and can't find one.

EDIT: Navicat it looks like.

One comment, way back int he mists of times (the 90's) MySQL was known as the database that would eat your data. It had a number of data gobbling bugs, as well as no transactions.
I'm genuinely surprised how far good marketing and ease of use will go to make a product successful. The postgres guys might learn a bit there. Ease of use will drive a lot of adoption.
Your rant is relevant to the insightful parent --which also provides arguments for what it says--, how exactly?
Thanks for answering! What I don't understand is that, given that your starting point is "two computers talking over a malicious network", doesn't the current state of affairs of (unencrypted)DNS mean that it's game over from the outset? That is, if the network is malicious, that MITM could very refer you to an invalid IP address the moment you first try to resolve, say, mail.google.com.

Please don't take this as an argument. I just want to know where I'm wrong! I just can't get over the idea of pushing at the (justifiably) paranoid level for HTTPS while we still have plain-text DNS... even with DNSSEC!

Wish request: Your thoughts on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4268461.
I think the vocabulary has been there, it's just very poorly taught/communicated. The c2 wiki was where I first encountered it. Old OOPSLA program proceedings, if you can find them, have some jewels among the cruft. And there is always Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns...
> our data which is partitioned by week then organized according to a hierarchical triangular mesh with bitmapped indexes

Sounds like you're getting your money's worth out of Oracle - which is a good thing. For many others (especially those in the .NET world) they use very few of the high end SQL Server stuff.
I have no problem with any sentence except your first.

What you're describing is not what's referred to by snake oil. Snake oil is when you sell a useless product to someone; network effects are not useless. You might argue that advertisers are selling snake oil and network effects are facilitating that, but the issue is not network effects.
Navicat - it's a great GUI
Yep - easy to alter the defaults. My point was that these are the defaults which I consider silly.
Real Games was a huge missed opportunity. If they'd engaged indie developers to get quality games instead of mainstream Zynga dreck into Google+, they'd have a real singular (non-copyable) draw instead of competing in the red ocean with Facebook as a "Me, too" product.
Self-Made Maverick - Mark Cuban
By research they mean nothing of the kind Guido can produce for Google or in general.
<3 internet vigilantes
The point being made by mythz to barista was that Metro's HTML5 + JavaScript was not portable (cross-platform), and you clearly agree.

The only one talking about 'bad' is you saying it's 'not bad'.
I'm one of those shouting guys on a trading floor
What's the second one that pops to mind? And, because I can actually name a second one :p, what's the third?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how human psychology works. Mocking and marginalizing a group makes them more likely to engage in extremist acts, not less.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...
>> And Boot to Gecko will no doubt use lots of Firefox OS specific stuff just as WebOS does.

Where did you hear that? everything I've heard is the exact opposite:

http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/a-deep-dive-into-mozilla...
>> Everything is HTML5
>> The core to the Boot to Gecko project is the web. Everything you see — right down to the power icon and network status information — is generated by and displayed with HTML5. The icons for the apps, the apps themselves, and the notifications the apps generate… all HTML5. Even the Dialer and the Settings for the device are handled this way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
>> Firefox OS (formerly Boot to Gecko, B2G) is an open source operating system in development by Mozilla that aims to support HTML5 apps written using "open Web" technologies rather than platform-specific native APIs. The idea is essentially to have all user-accessible software running on the phone be a Web app that uses advanced HTML5 techniques and device APIs to access the phone's hardware directly via JavaScript.[2] It initially targets Android-compatible smartphones.

The difference is Firefox OS is building as much as they can (everything?) with HTML5, Whilst all Metro's advanced functionality is hidden behind proprietary APIs - The comparison of "open-ess" between the 2 is not even close.
True; but, I think what they're trying to say is the spirit is the same.

1) Not interested. Why? Doesn't make us money.

2) Supressing. Why? Because this keeps us from making money.
are you paid for talking about postgres via tekpub or otherwise? sometimes your postgres chatter seems like you are.
FYI, EC2's machines do have ECC ram. They don't advertise it, though.
See https://tfspreview.com/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codeplex/archive/2012/04/30/new-code...
It's the prime example of how JS and HTML is a failed model for efficient application implementation. It is not an example of Android's failing.
Other way around - I like Postgres a lot, so I talk about it and do videos.
You won't see it confirmed by people because there are NDAs around it. And people that are happy with their Microsoft account managers have no reason to complain on twitter or any other tech blog and get into potential legal trouble :-)
What existing "HTML5 API" is going to give you network status and power icon info? Of course everything will be HTML5/JavaScript/CSS just like Chrome OS, but the fact remains that that functionality doesn't exist in the W3C specs as they are.

Checking out the Mozilla Docs at https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI it appears that these "privileged" APIs are extensions, as they should be. For example, navigator.fm.antennaAvailable is to control the FM Radio.
Israel has been using/endorsing similar tactics with software-assisted, crowd-sourced trolling tool(s) since ages. The assistance is in the form of curation of targets to troll against, not generate troll speech.

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

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/06/giyus_megaphone/

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=42902
I tried Inconsolata few times, but i could never stick with it...

My history of programming fonts goes something like this:

- i know they were mono

- Dejavu sans / vera sans mono

- proggy clean (back in the days of low resolution, i really loved it )

(switched to mac)

- monaco

- andale mono

Once in a while i try some other font, but i keep returning to Andale Mono.
(best MS product ever? :)
There is a splinter group of people- who- want- DNSSEC who argue that DNSSEC will obviate the need for CAs. There reasoning, distilled, is that DNSSEC is itself a PKI, with the roots signing TLDs and TLDS signing domains and so on. Since the core architecture purpose of certificates is to "break the tie" between an attacker's public key and the real site's public key, and since DNSSEC zones could serve the same purpose, by housing a DNSSEC-signed public key, blammo, no more Verisign.

There are a bunch of problems with this idea. Most of the ones that spring to my mind are problems with DNSSEC in general: its brittleness, the reliability problems I think it's going to cause, the things it does that actually diminish the security of the DNS... but the big point relevant here is: DNSSEC replaces a market of CAs with a baked- into- the- Internet fiat authority. If DNSSEC had replaced SSL CA's in the mid '00s, Ghaddafi's Libya would have been Bit.ly's CA. This does not seem like a win to me.

I don't think that rent-seeking SSL CAs are as big a problem as many HN users seem to think they are. I think ultimately there's significant expense involved in operating a secure CA, and that relative to their purported value, CA certificates are reasonably priced.

The pressing problem with SSL/TLS is that CAs aren't trustworthy. They are rent-seeking, as expected, but also shoddily operated. The Internet has largely lost faith in the people operating CAs.

Moreover, a decade and a half of browser/CA relationships have left all the major browsers riddled with skeleton-key CA certs run by organization that nobody can really vouch for. As a result, large companies have purchased browser-trusted CA operations, and then used them to do incredibly dubious things. The companies that have been caught doing skanky stuff with their CA keys haven't even been kicked out of the browser CA stores.

As a result, we're left with a situation in which untrustworthy companies can potentially sign certificates for (and thus enable transparent MITM attacks against) critically important sites, like Google Mail. That's an untenable position.

I personally believe (and, yes, hope) that the future of Internet security looks much like today, except with things like Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike's TACK scheme, to allow security-sensitive sites to overrule bogus CAs, and to allow us to gradually decrease the architectural dependence we have on SSL CAs and start experimenting with more flexible alternatives.

I am not a fan of trying to take the same model that just failed us, but centralizing it and handing it over to the unaccountable groups of people who control the domain name system.
Agreed. If we get first class support for MySQL with C# running on Mono I will run to C# for all my development work instantly.
Make a new submission.
Microsoft code contains the phrase 'big boobs'
Yes, it's a silly default, but I don't think it's the fatal flaw that you make it out to be. That's ok though, this is clearly an advocacy piece, so I don't expect nuance.

If none of that freaks you out, then I have one word for you: Oracle.

This to me smacks of FUD.

Oracle, evil and terrible as they are, would have a very hard time killing or otherwise harming MySQL due to the code being GPL'd and the vibrant MySQL community (Percona, Facebook, Twitter, Drizzle, MariaDB, SkySQL, etc) that fixes bugs, adds features, and directly competes with the work Oracle does.