skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It seems to me that Microsoft so desperately craves monopoly power, it is blind to the opportunities simply afforded by making a good product that people want and selling it to them.

Microsoft will do that when all else fails - IE4 was a wonderful browser.

However, that strategy works well only when you can wait until your competition does a mistake. The main reason for NetScape's demise was NetScape. The main reason for Lotus' demise was Lotus. Similarly for Borland. (Not sure about Caldera and WordPerfect, though).

However, so far Google have been executing very competently. So have Apple (mobile os + hardware), Nintendo and Sony (game consoles). And up until a couple of years ago, even Macromedia/Adobe with Flash (remember Liquid Motion? No one does, but it was MS' first attempt to displace Flash. Remember Silverlight? That's the newest)

Microsoft strategy has been to execute on par with competitor, and wait until they stumble. Microsoft doesn't know what to do against competent execution. So far, it didn't really hurt them.

(Not that I know what to do against competent execution a-la Google, and Apple -- but Microsoft seems to want to be the end-all-be-all of everything software).
Hence, even the best developers on earth work for the money :).

We are all people at the end of the day, nobody is immune except for a select few like Stallman...
I would love to see incubators on more campuses. Especially considering certain underfunded state institutions (such as the one I am from myself), having an incubator could not only encourage the emergence of a hacker community but also emphasize the importance of knowing business fundamentals. Should engineers know who a VC is or what "private equity" really means? I think so.
How is it different than Prism and the likes?
If you know what you're doing, you'd know how to get around this limitation, with the --ignore-certificate-errors option for example. Any knowledgeable front-end or back-end developer would know how to find this out by doing a Google search. As long as you don't train the rest of the staff to do the same, that's fine. Now, why isn't the IT department fixing this security and usability problem?
Maybe the resolution would have been the same. But it's possible to upload a photo in Instagram without stopping to apply a filter, isn't it?
Microsoft posts net income loss of $492 million for Q4 2012
Usability. [Which isn't to say that there aren't great front-ends, but just that DVCS has a reputation for poor usability and a Microsoft solution that's pretty good and easy to use (especially for TFS users) would likely be well-received.]
Pocket hasn't revealed their plans for monetization moving forward, but this post does a great job of explaining free vs paid, and why free is sometimes necessary: http://blog.ideashower.com/post/21276590202/why-pocket-went-...
If you know what you're doing, get the CA=YES cert from your proxy and install it in your browser.
But that's just it, you don't extrapolate benchmarks outside the context of the benchmark. Without testing it you don't know if selecting 2 rows an extra 1ms, 200ms or 0.001ms. Many ORM have high overhead per query but are optimized to handle large result set's so depending on usage loading 1,000 rows might be faster than it's competitors.

PS: A lot of frameworks are actually setup to handle the least important case first, handling large result sets are generally more important than the overhead for tiny query's. It's nice to be able to for things to work so a query that returns 1/2 million rows still returns in 1/100th a second and you can start paging through that result set even if the behavior adds overhead in the simple case. Chances are there is a shortcut if you only want 1 result just look for .first or a similar shortcut.
"I rarely find anything suitable for my classes, so I usually do direct searches by subject on Google, sometimes site-restricting to sites of educational institutions, to find suitable materials for my classes."

Can you clarify why they're not suitable? Or are there any patterns in your unmet needs?

Which issues are most frustrating for you, or take up annoyingly large chunks of your time?

There are lots of people here who are interested in working on educational problems, either in a commercial or non-commercial context.
How can he sleep at night? You might as well put fluoride into ice cream to help prevent kids from rotting their teeth.
Infinite Flight Simulator for iOS: a Rough Ride
a) Exchange that doesn't have near-ubiquitous device support is a much less viable product, and leaves a giant gaping hole for a competitor.

b) Yanking support breaks their customer's trust; and could possibly invite more anti-trust attention.
I still think that there is no incentive for developers to switch. This situation has a parallel to the Windows Phone app development grants.

Microsoft is paying startups to hire someone to develop a Windows Phone app. After speaking to these companies they say they highly doubt they'll get any value from it and don't intend to continue developing for the platform.

You're offering developers an open platform to develop on that at the moment has under 1000 users. I think a developer could still make more money on a huge locked down platform like Twitter than on 'join.app.net'?

Even if a developer eventually gets kicked off, I'm sure they earned a lot more in the time they were live than on a small platform.

I think $50 yearly is too high for early adopters and even higher for the developers you need, I love the Pinboard.in model, they offer a one off price that is set based on the number of users. So the earlier you join the lower the price. Right now it's $9.84.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Use groupthink to ease the angries out into tge open. Way to raise the bar on discourse, military-industrial complex.
What The MixTape Is Back? We Interview Los Angeles Startup Mixtaping.FM
No. The whole idea of HSTS is that you can never trust the DNS; you assume that's the most likely way an attacker is going to MITM her victims. HSTS tells the browser to remember that from that point on, all connections to SERVER.NAME have to happen under a TLS session with a valid cert.
Why AccountChooser Isn't
Anonymous: the offense that America needs, but not the offense that America wants.
You have extra hardware and an entire software stack just to block spam, and you use this to argue that spam is not a big deal?
Excellent find, thanks for sharing. It's nice to read the paragraph in its context. From the blog post, I understood that T.S. Eliot quoted Massinger, and that it wasn't his own opinion. Now I see they were Eliot's own words.

"Eliot's intention, "A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest." would discredit every technology company or figure that has been defended by the cliche."

I don't believe so. For example: Jony Ive's designs for Apple have been said to be copies of Dieter Rams' vintage designs for Braun. Ive himself has openly acknowledged that he is inspired by Rams, and that he tries to follow Rams' 10 design principles [1]. I believe that, by Eliot's standards, makes him a 'good poet', given that Ive took from a designer remote in time (50 years a go), from a different product category (computers instead of home appliances), and using different materials (aluminum and glass instead of wood and steel).

[1] https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design
Mourning and Virtual Heritage: Remembering Armando Montano
All of these are good recommendations.

Another technology to start preparing for is TACK. It allows you, the server owner, to control browser pinning of your certs while maintaining CA mobility. This gives you the control over your security that Google has over Gmail via Chrome cert pinning without having to issue a new browser build every time you change CAs.

One way to think of it is like a domain transfer lock but with cryptography. You control how you unlock your pin to allow mobility to a new CA by sticking a signed file on your SSL server.

http://tack.io/

[Disclosure: one of the authors of TACK is a former co-worker.]
This is great!
Does all of this stuff work with Chrome?
Microsoft code contains the phrase 'big boobs' ... Yes, really
I think the article addressed this, the claim being that there is no "long established expectation of privacy" in text messages, unlike postal mail and voice telephone calls. Thus warrant required to search/wiretap the latter, not the former.
To be clear, I assume you are asking about developing for iOS using MonoTouch and VisualStudio. Android development is in Visual Studio natively.

Apparently you can do some development, but you can't compile in Visual Studio.

http://escoz.com/blog/developing-with-monotouch-on-windows-a...

So you get Visual Studio, Intellisense, tools like Resharper, but you can't quite build, because of missing elements. The build process would be to swap over to the Mac side to build and simulate.

Not perfect, but it's nice to know it's there.
It sounds like a reprise of the Apple vs. Microsoft "Look-and-feel" lawsuits of the mid 80s, only with patents, not copyright.
SongPop Cheat Using node.js Proxy Server
"I ended up sniffing HTTP traffic between the iOS PopSong client and the server and realized that everything was unencrypted and readable."
Why? Why do you need to make those distinctions? The doctor couldn't fly to Haiti if he hadn't been funded. You need a lot of different pieces working together to make big change.
Thank you for you answer ;) I'm actually making my master thesis on this topic, and you are the first person I hear ( sort of) telling me that "Many mid-life startups fail because their technical debt causes them to be unable to quickly grow and respond to changing conditions."

If you could please support this statement somehow, I'd really appreciate (not because I don't trust you or I disagree, but because researches need references ;)
Currently I can only see these as yet another way to lose a little bit of your privacy. But I'm also a debian kind of guy so... :P
Ask HN: Review my startup, beerram.com
Agile Tools Won’t Solve Your Problem Part 1
Many organizations put off an Agile transformation until they’ve evaluated and found the right Agile or Scrum tool that they believe will solve all their problems.
Fixed. We now only request read access to public github data. Thanks again for the feedback.
Ha, don't worry about it.

I was thinking it was the significant digits after the decimal. It's always been my weakness calculation-wise.

How about 14E3 feet? :P
It doesn't require you to have dev tools installed.
Lean Analytics Book
".as hackers, we've take a spirit of openness and free exchange for granted. "

I think that stems from being a member of the "non it" group originally and finding acceptance among a group of people that appreciate and reinforce someone's willingness to share with others.

"that checklist is going to be seized on by the malpractice lawyer."

It's worse than that. My wife is a Physician. Not a week goes by when she tells me a hospital story where I think up something that a lawyer could use against them for something they don't do correctly or could have prevented.

An example, from just this morning:

The hospital that she works at has physicians that are on call to cover if there is an overload of patients. But they also have Physicians that will ask another to cover them if they can't make it in or have some other obligation. But there is no system in place to prevent the person who is "on call" from agreeing to help someone even though they are backup for the other situation. It's entirely up to the Physician to not do the wrong thing. And it happens since that is why I am telling this story and how the discussion came up.
Ask HN: Any good free SEO website analyzer?
Hi,

I wonder if there is any good (ideally free) SEO service for analyzing a static website.
if you need an absolute URI for any assets, then just use:

//www.example.com/path/to/asset.js

this will then use the same transport as the containing page uses.
Dalton is obviously just using Fred Wilson's name to market his app.net bullshit.

Protip to Dalton: Nobody cares about twitter ads as you do, it will never take off. After you fail for the 1383th time, please quit.
Microsoft reports first quarterly loss ever
Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com) is a good option for creating/managing environments.
I got Navicat during a sale on the App Store. It's the first app where I wished I could re-buy it at list price. It is GREAT.
Sorry, I only have anecdotes. You need data =D
Attacking SCADA and Relative Cost of Entry
Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $18.06 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2012. Operating income and loss per share for the quarter were $192 million and $0.06 per share.
But these machines are not machines owned and operated by Microsoft. If a (non---porn using) vicar stores his Bible study notes on his PC, he knows they're not going be sharing a disk with porn.

There is an ick-factor here, I'm not saying it's rational.
A TXON (Text Object Notation) parser in Factor
The larger point is that software companies can restrict what you do with their software, even if you buy it.
It makes totally sense to me. What I've found interviewing many startups, is that they just don't have the time to document anything, and other priorities ( time-to-market , burning investor cash, demo days, angry users ) are definitely more important than documenting .

Or, more specifically, they usually start by planning and documenting everything, and they end up with outdated documentation, spaghetti code, and " issue-driven " development as they move forward.

Many of them told me that "using rails framework help us in not writing documentation, because ruby standards are pretty well defined"

do you guys agree somehow?
This is a cross between propaganda and the infiltration of extreme domestic organizations by the FBI in the 70's.

Yet more snipping at leaves while the roots continue to grow.
if you did worked in startups, you are data :D (did u? ) :D
Navicat is great, it has been surprisingly helpful to have the same database client app for all of the different DB systems (Postgres, MySQL, Sqlite) that I need to interact with.
How Apple is Failing
Hey Dan.

This is what I don't like about your frame: this kid isn't actually a layman in the sense of layman vs specialist. He's probably a proto-doctor of some kind.

There certainly is a tension within academic fields between specialists and interdisciplinarians, but i would argue the layperson/specialist dichotomy, when it comes to contributions like this one, is a special case of the specialism/interdisciplinary dichotomy.

Medicine is a particularly interesting case, because there divisions are further fractured into basic research, applied research (say medical devices), and actual implementation of research findings, and between each of these are holes and pitfalls, where only a special few bridge the gaps, and help to transfer knowledge.

I would bet that this kid is, in actuality, the kind of person who makes up those bridges, as opposed to just someone who doesn't have the blinders a specialist has developed.
I don't mean to argue a black to the Jobs fans' white; as long as the discussion is nuanced, I am perfectly satisfied. Just compare the org chart of Apple to that of Microsoft to see how much they differ.

Cook's job is still hugely significant, but it's too Hacker News-like to reduce everything to a catchy one-liner or word meant to suggest that Apple is in dire straits, when it's more complicated than that.
what Steve Jobs did, he made them happen.

In light of what came out in the authorized biography, it's sounding like that might not have been the case after all. It's not just that Jobs didn't come up with all the best ideas to come out of Apple over the past decade. It's that, all too often, he was fighting them tooth and nail, and other powerful (if lesser-known) figures at Apple managed to push them through despite.

The implication is that while it might have looked like all great ideas came from one man, that was just part of the carefully-managed public image and the real machine driving it all is a whole lot of creative tension.
Thanks for that. Reading this, I immediately thought "hey, this sounds just like Mozilla's Prism?" Watching the video basically confirmed that it is, but now with some integration with Unity. That integration is pretty key I guess, but Prism isn't exactly new.
You might want to provide a bit more context with regards to what your start-up is trying to accomplish and what you want people at HN to comment on. The design looks great, but other than that, what are you looking for feedback on?
12 tools for converting flash games to html5
As a hiring manager, I do look at github accounts if a candidate includes one. Even from a small project you can often tell if the person is clueless or not.
What web apps need desperately in order to become true first class citizens is support for keyboard shortcuts across the board.

Doing Alt + <Key> should bring up the appropriate menu in the web app not the web browser.

Doing Ctrl + S should ask the web app to do a save , not ask the browser to save the .html page.

Of course this is all stuff that could be abused by aggressive websites so there needs to be a distinction between apps and pages.
Wow, that's actually very nice in terms of RAM usage. Right now in chrome, with only 6 tabs open I am using (according to about:memory)800MB of RAM[1]. I may very well switch back to Firefox if I can get performance like that.

[1]http://puu.sh/JXL9
"Malpractice"

Another woman (that I dated for many years not my wife) was a radiologist. She wouldn't even go on the record in reviewing another docs interpretation of a study. Didn't want to get on the chart lest get sued.

Otoh others in her group took malpractice as a necessary cost of doing business to churning out a top number of studies per day. It was expected that you would get sued and almost was a marker that you produced a lot of work.

The other thing that happened quite frequently that I personally experienced was the signing of study reports. If she didn't get her studies signed (electronically she did this from home so much for hipaa) someone else would sign them for her. They would just do "y" "y" "y" never reading and never catching errors in her dictation. Just approving so it could move to a final state. (You know the same way customer service people want to "close out" a support ticket).
In short, yes. There have been quite a few studies that show that low fat diets have no bearing on developing heart disease.

But here is the rub. Most studies that show X,Y, and Z lead to heart disease are observational epidemiological studies. This means that researchers collect data from a number of disparate sources and attempt to make sense of it. The problem is that it is very hard to tease out confounding variables.

So I don't put much stock in this type of study. They have their value, but I wouldn't make any life decisions off of them. Their primary purpose is to help formulate hypotheses that can be tested experimentally.

When it comes to experimental tests, the lipid hypothesis has been shown to be wrong over and over. On the contrary, quite a bit of experimental data shows that a grain based, low fat, high carbohydrate increases the markers for heart disease.
Javascript AAC audio decoder
here is the official announcement which includes GOOG's balance sheet: http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q2_google_earnings....
I really have to admit I share the level of distaste for Twitter ads. And your post sounds really discouraging, something I normally don't see here on HN.
I don't think that has anything to do with Big Pharma. That's the medical supply manufacturers using their supply chains to keep the little guys out.
I think what jblow is trying to get across is that simply writing an article saying "server side JS and client side packet sending libraries exist" hardly begins to solve the problem of how to implement responsive and robust netcode. Node.js and socket.io are literally technology in the broad sense and make a huge number of things possible, but they offer no help with the hard parts of writing a Real Time Multiplayer game. It isn't relevant, it doesn't facilitate the job, it's the wrong layer of abstraction; at the level of actually making sure your real time game performs well, it is not technology. If the article pointed to an actual netcode library for JavaScript games, then yes, that would be technology.

e: reading jblow's other comments makes me realize he's not talking about this at all. So treat the above as my personal issue with the article.
Assuming their QA is good enough for most customers, being cheaper is a pretty obvious benefit.
It looks like they've started their big Open initiative after they found a business case for it with Windows Azure where almost everything OSS'ed in recent times runs on it.

When you're a cloud provider it makes sense to appear "more open" and support as many technologies as possible == more customers - which is good from the broad developer community as we would have never have seen their node.js on Windows support otherwise.
But "not being interested" is not the same as "suppressing".
Well said Diego. I think it's a testament to Manu's desire to be hands-on and actively involved in every company he backs. He wants to add value to everything he is involved with, and the best way he can do this is by being close to the companies he invests in.
Keep your bash history forever
Google Inc. Announces Second Quarter 2012 Financial Results
To be fair, 0xDEADBEEF may be considered offensive to hindus.
> Microsoft gave us a choice: either pay a ton of money to re-certify the game and issue a new patch (which for all we know could introduce new issues, for which we’d need yet another costly patch), or simply put the patch back online. They looked into it, and the issue happens so rarely that they still consider the patch to be “good enough”.

To someone with no background on this at all, this is just painful to read. That parenthetical bespeaks a lazy attitude towards engineering. "Why fix it when we might just break it again? It's not like we're actually good enough at this to have confidence in our work!"
Do you realize that it's not the abstract concept of an enterprise using a browser, but a human being? Which, usually, is not the person administering the server. I'm all for nudging people to change their own behaviour to the better, but this is driving your principles home on the back of the user.

Considering your use of the word "breakage": DannoHung is talking about a button that is actively being disabled in certain situations, not something bad being enabled. This is extra code in a security critical part of the browser. Thus, we can assume that there were meetings that discussed this "feature" and its implications, the actual coding, code reviews and QA, adding up to quite a bit of opportunity cost. That begs the question: Would this time have been better spent on something that adds more security?

Disabling manual overrides may seem like a good idea, but it can go horribly wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_2904
Perhaps fix your mobile routes - http://www.m.beerram.com/ doesn't work
I remember watching the Kevin Rose foundation interview with Dennis Crowley and he said how they were hiring and one guy went out and got a number of mayor deals with businesses in his area.

While this may be an awesome way to got about getting hired, some businesses may not react well to such 'guerrilla' tactics.

Edit: Foundation interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijOIibM4L7I