skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I found that, while the architecture is changing, it wasn’t as dramatically as I had initially hoped."

What, specifically, did you hope MS would change? Say what you will about the product, but the Windows platform has been a cool piece of engineering for a while now.

"Design is about making choices and Metro makes none."

This assertion seems to be the central point of your post, but I don't think you provided the evidence to back it up. How is simplicity not a design choice? What about "be authentically digital" as a design mantra? I'm not refuting your assertion, I just wasn't swayed by your arguments. Maybe you could point to some specific examples to illustrate what you mean.
"Design is about making choices and Metro makes none. Of course excessive skeuomorphism is bad but it is design because it makes a statement and presents no choice. What Microsoft shows in “balls” to make changes it’s lacking in making choices. The lack of depth and uniqueness of the Metro interface reminds me of design work when empty of inspiration and avoiding a carbon copy from another design: flat geometric objects with simple colors. You may criticise Apple’s, at times excessive, skeuomorphism or even Google’s “engineered look”, but those are choices. With Metro, Microsoft is undesigning the UI because they’re seemingly out of ideas and refusing to make choices."

Does anyone actually agree with this? There are a lack of examples and evidence in his post. It seems to me the author just doesn't like the Metro design language.

"Good design is as little design as possible" - Dieter Rams
Autodesk buys Socialcam
"Be prepared to back up your claims with documented, solid evidence of the behavior. Keep emotional, hyperbolic, prejudicial expressions or assertions to yourself - they will only work against you in such situations. Avoid ultimatums. Express faith in the system and the ability for the person to change. Express willingness to change yourself. In other words, come off as the bigger person right from the beginning and at all times."

Based on past bitter experience I've boiled this down to, "Don't be easy to dismiss."
Torchlight art assets stolen, used in iOS game Armed Heroes
RedPhone is now Open Source
The examples you gave exactly match my intentions. I'm not sure where we are disagreeing, unless you are interpreting the phrases "intelligence" and "intelligence quotient" as more exclusive than most people. If that is the case, give me your definition of "intelligence", and we'll see where we go from there.
Sort of. In achievement-obsessed South Korea, there's wide reverence for judaism and study of the Talmud, despite the country historically being very non-jewish.
http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/48771/why-...
How do they not deserve money to be a part of their name when they do things like this: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/132935-microsoft-tweaki...

M$ is appropriate.
The best investment a parent can make to improve the child's IQ is DHA, omega 3 fatty acid. It is a key ingredient of a brain, and a typical diet is very deficient in DHA.

http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-pregnancy-does-...

Additionally, checkout the:
http://www.omega3.org/
We're talking about "the best predictor of IQ" which is not the same thing as having a large, negative effect in a small number of cases.
At standard IQ tests? Surely the creature doing a a standard IQ test needs at the very least opposable thumbs?

There will of course be exceptions, but a brain damaged but somewhat functioning human will always score better than a non-human at human-designed intelligence tests.

The argument isn't that a dolphin or bonobo isn't potentially smarter than a brain damaged human, but that by designing our tests for human use we are explicitly excluding non humans.
I think the article tells nothing of importance as it is right now. Since when has applying thermal paste been messy and requiring trial and error to apply "correctly"?

These days the thermal load(W/cm²) between the CPU heat spreader(the nickel alloy(?) coated copper plate on top of the CPU package) and the heatsink base is so low compared to the thermal load between the CPU core and the CPU heat spreader, that even if you manage to use ten times more efficient interface material in between, the actual heat transfer from the CPU core to the heatsink base wouldn't increase all that much. It's easy to understand, when you consider that the heat spreader has so much more surface area than the actual CPU die.

In simplified layman terms, no matter what you put between the CPU and the heatsink base, you get the same temperature give or take a few degrees celsius. Of course, the thermal compound starts to matter much more when you overclock and the thermal load may double or even triple.

I guess new inventions like described in the article are welcome though, but personally I am no excited at all, regardless of the claimed thermal conductivity and "real world performance".
You In The Grand Prix Challenge?
Seriously? You think its standard for people to protect trade secrets out of the goodness of their hearts?

I would not discuss a valuable invention with my dad without an NDA.
Yeah, 99% of everything is crap. Large companies aren't immune to that. If anything, the opposite. <shrug> whatchagonnado? :)

Public shaming works to stamp out activities that the shamee knows to be bad/anti-social. I think the case here is well-intentioned.
Even Hickey states in this article that the term comes from James Coplien. His C++ book from 1992 was what first introduced me to the concept.
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'

-Betteridge's Law of Headlines:
No. I don't know why you're not listening to what he's saying. I can tell you, from currently writing code that does STUN negotiation, unless you have two peers behind full-cone NAT (which is rather rare actually), you do not need to know what the port mapping/translation is.

I have a sideband connection to a server, and I tell it to route my negotiation packets to my peer's sideband connection. I literally never even touch a UDP port or connection, and the library I uses establishes a connection using STUN(-light). And from having read the source, it doesn't explicitly determine or set the mapping (using uPNP) either.
Project Jigsaw: Late for the Train (Java modularity to be postponed to 2015)
I'm in the US. Still waiting for mine too.
Not exactly. Or to put it more precisely, the goal is to better understand fusion, which by the way, helps us better understand bombs that use it and perhaps more importantly the old bombs we have laying around that we knew would work in 1974 but now we aren't so sure.

That said, one application of the NIF is as the ultimate incinerator. Using it to literally rip apart hazardous waste (either the nuclear or more mundane variety) into lower atomic number atoms which are not a problem.

And of course if they can get out more than they put in, then an energy neutral (and fast) disposal system.

That said, the physics of the place are astounding, I got to tour the place about 10 years ago when it was still being built and man, it is right up there with the LHC in terms of extremely large and at the same time precise physics machines.
Donald J. Sobol, Creator of Encyclopedia Brown, Dies at 87
what if i need to search for a solution to something or find out if it's a bug in IDE or it's me doing something wrong? doesn't seems like a very good idea to me personally. just learning to focus on your target would probably help more
I know this is true, but "Hickey functors" is what the people who introduced them to me called them.
1) GBP 2,000 still seems steep to me. Assuming I'll have to pay an scientific editor (who selects reviewers, forwards manuscripts and decision revisions, etc) GBP 100 per hour, he could spend 10 work hours on the article -- total cost: GBP 1,000. I realize that there's a large variance on time required though, depending on how referees and authors agree, but 10 hours seems at the upper end of the spectrum. Of course, if we'll have to pay a typesetter + infrastructure, GBP 2,000 might be where we'll end up. However, I have the impression that these proposals offload all typesetting to the authors.

2) Can you enlighten me (or suggest reading) on how HN ranks submissions? I've had discussions about some sort of ranking of papers, but we generally concluded that the sheer amount of papers published daily would make it tough to get enough (>10?) votes for being somewhat representative I imagine (for example, astro-ph on arxiv sees 50-100 submissions daily). But as you suggest, some algorithm doing preliminary ranking might help this (although it also spells danger).
"I had three requirements for seeking a great job; All glory, Top pay, No work."
The Retina MacBook Pro Is Cheaper Than the Regular MacBook Pro
Is New York’s Startup Scene a ‘One-Trick Pony’?
PHP's brighter future? On the "PHP the Right Way" project
When these first came out I was gagging for one, but since then the enthusiasm I had has been slowly dwindling.

I wonder how many others are like me, and how much more they might have sold had they waited to have a bit more stock at launch.

(I'm not taking anything away from the product or the team, just an observation/question on launch strategies.)
Spent 2 weeks in France. The first week was spent partaking in the various options of French cuisine. With that first week being torturous, the second week was spent eating at McDonalds. At least the McD's there sells beer. :)
This article should be titled, “The latest findings on IQ” because IQ score and “intelligence” in a general sense are very different things. Plenty has been published on the inherent cultural and gender biases in IQ testing.

Statements like “when babies from poor families are adopted into wealthy families, their IQ goes up” are almost devoid of information because the IQ test itself favors the type of “intelligence” valued by the educated, wealthy class.
> I still don't get why everyone is so pissed off about fullscreen

1. because it's garbage

2. because applications which used to have a working fullscreen mode — such as firefox — and get converted to the Lion API result in no gain and lots of pain

> So why don't you just not use fullscreen mode, and continue doing everything you've been doing with dual monitors since the days of OS X 10.0 ?

Like use fullscreen mode on Firefox, which has been there forever? Oh wait, now I can't. Just as I can't use fullscreen mode on, say, Quicktime X. Or have movies display on the big screen. I didn't really want them on the 27" anyway, the 15" is so much better isn't it? Pulls you closer to the screen, unless you don't care for the picture.

> You lose nothing, and gain nothing, so it makes absolutely 0 difference in your workflow.

Yes actually: Firefox still had a fullscreen mode which actually worked correctly. Now it does not, unless there is some sort of hidden setting able to toggle back to the "old" API as there is in VLC.
Let me just counter that with my experience. I can focus better and I get things done much better when eat regulary and when I eat well (no fast food, not too much fat etc). If I eat to late or if I only eat a sandwich for breakfast the whole day can become ruined and if I completely skip a meal I'll be worse off for a day or two.

But that's just me.
Brings back memories for me. With all this information and technology at their fingertips, I hope that kids today have the the same sense of wonder and mystery that we had growing up.
I experience this too. The period when I arrive at work before I've eaten anything is usually my most focused. I feel calm and I would describe my mind as "quiet". Once I eat, it's like everything gets noisy and I have a really difficult time concentrating for longer than about a minute on anything.
What are the Pandodaily writers smoking? SocialCam raised probably somewhere around 2 million (seems to be the normal 'seed' round nowadays) in April (that's what Crunchbase says) and sold for $60 million. That's a 30-fold return in 4 months.
All that cocaine money has to go somewhere.
The Friendship - truth2tell
I agree with you. I've been listening to Merlin Mann's podcast Back To Work and he talks a lot about things like this and things like "distraction-free writing environments". His philosophy (that I tend to agree with) is that if these tools work for you - great. But you might be solving the wrong problem. Procrastination might be your brain telling you something about the task you're putting off doing.

http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care
A Culture of Clutter: Average LA family has 2,260 possessions
I ordered mine the first day the sites came back up after their crash. I just last week got an email saying it was time to order, and apparently it takes 12 weeks to ship from the UK to the US east coast. If they can't fulfill a single order, how can they fulfill bulk orders?
Looks like a variation of a rapidly exploring random tree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidly-exploring_random_tree
> You are hardly in a position to talk. Anyway, the only 'personal attack' that I see is calling you a jerk - which seems to be rather an entirely accurate characterization.

I did not attack you personally in any way. You have chosen to resort to name calling without justification. I'll let the reader decided where the ad-hominem originated, which is really obvious.

I never once suggested that a physical attack was justified. You are choosing to read and extrapolate that out of my words. It's wrong, but you are free to use your imagination in any way you care to.

Live long and prosper.
It does give you a good intuition as to why twin primes aka N, N+2 are so common.
I read it -- a while back actually. I ended up getting to it by following a link for some other interview that Ravi had posted on LinkedIn.

BTW, my actions might be biased: I like reading. If I had an option between reading and listening, I would pick reading most of the time.
This is How You Paint a 150 Foot Batman
It's an opinion piece. Why does everything have to be subject to a body of evidence like in a court of law?
My start up (non profit) spin off - Rx Drug Abuse Epidemic
I had to deal with shitty, shitty Internet once. I downloaded the docs ahead of time when I did have a good connection. Then when you're online later, what you still haven't figured out you attack.

It is not really that hard, I think it is just a culture shock for some to not have the Internet nearby. It was for me.
I can't speak from experience about getting acquired, but I definitely see how it could be an attention drain. I was more speaking to the stickiness of the product. Socialcam grew really quickly, but shrunk just as fast because people didn't stay around. That to me seems very hard to monetize.
Huge hype then huge wait times have that effect. I know with Guild Wars 2, I was hyped beyond belief... two years ago. I then played the betas this spring/summer and thought "yeah, this is cool. I guess."

Extreme hype wears off quick, and needs to be capitalized upon immediately. I can already feel the same thing happening with the Microsoft Surface.

I do know that if I could have bought 10 RPis in March, I would have. Last week I paid for my preorder of one and feel thats probably enough.
I agree. These tools will only work for someone who would have been able to do it anyway.

You might find something like this helps you, but you're not going to find that if you can't do it that this will change that.
Clamshell The Story of the Greatest Computing Form Factor of All Time
Well that would certainly cover the 'risk everything to turn it around' idea posited above. I don't think anyone thinks FB didn't overpay for Instagram, it seemed like a desperate move, but then again they were flush with cash and it might be a great value compared to building their own.
Great points, which I obviously failed to clarify! :)

Regarding the architecture, I was thinking specifically of the mixed delivery of a whole new one (Metro/touch-driven) and the old/current one (classic Windows/mouse-driven). I've read quite a few articles about this but one I find myself agreeing with the most is Gruber's: http://daringfireball.net/2011/06/windows_8_fundamentally_fl... -- the main point is Microsoft failed to make the choice to potentially come up with two products, one designed for Touch and this new Metro architecture (ARM, HTML5 apps, etc…) and one geared for the desktop computer. They're so caught up on their perceived value of the "Windows" brand, they're failing to make the hard decisions…

As to your second question, I think my above point also covers this one in part. Microsoft is in a position to make some radical changes and improve on a product but avoids making those choices. Even the Surface will have a version with a full-blown CPU and ability to run desktop apps. Metro is caught in the middle of this "identity crisis" and, as such, fails to deliver a good experience in either camp. Furthermore, I think the core design model of "colored boxes" fails to deliver the unique experience that each app can offer: my experience with the "Music" app can't be the same as the "Control Panel". It becomes forgettable and everything blends together way too much. Yes, this particular point maybe a bit subjective but I'm sure some UX specialists could pitch in and give the hard evidence. My point is a "gut feeling" but informed by knowledge of what a good experience is… :)

Thank you for your comment! :)
btw, we have a special deal for YC companies(search for virool on deals site).

And we love all startups, not just YC so if you want to give us a try - email support at virool.com and we will give you a special deal
Is the pro version free for life, or for the next few days? Looking at your site, it looks like you are charging $19.95 a month.
I don't know if that's true about the Metro design or not, but about Windows 8 as a whole? Definitely. They tried to combine 2 OS's and 2 interfaces that are not even too consistent with each other (I've seen some concept designs that were much better), and have no place being together anyway, especially if you're forced to use the Metro interface when in desktop mode.
What you created is pretty boss.
Currently you will have to open a different browser if you want to google something. I'm considering adding a blacklisting/whitelisting option but I was going for minimalism with v1.
I still think you can have professional disagreements and make a compromise without being uncourteous and unprofessional. Of course, it's harder when the other party isn't being professional, but it's still possible.
This article seems to add no value to the discussion... Did you plan to make a point rooted in any sort of argument? Where did Microsoft not make a choice?

I think you might have an interesting point to make, and as someone who has worked on the project, I am especially interested in seeing and hearing criticism, but you have not provided any information or value to the discussion.
Financially, this was probably a great venture. But it's a bit disingenuous to really consider SocialCam as being a positive innovation. It relied on spam and taking advantage of users not knowing that it was "opt-out"[1].

I'm not hating on SocialCam (though I do hate it :)). But let's call it what it is - a good investment.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=socialcam%20sucks
For what it's worth, there's a precedence for it in formal, legal-style writing. UN resolutions, for example, are always written as a single sentence[1].

It makes sense when you think of an entire resolution (program) as a single goal (output/result), which involves many separate steps/clauses (statements) that need to be executed.

A period is a terminator; it says 'This thought ends here', while a semicolon is a delimiter (ie, the clauses it separates are independent grammatically, but not contextually).

[1]http://web.utk.edu/~modelun/resolutions.htm (Model UN rules, but you get the idea).
If only it had VGA output - there are so many incredibly cheap old LCD monitors on eBay. You could setup a huge number of very cheap terminals anywhere.
Autodesk is getting into the consumer space, trying to build a community of creators via acquisition. Another example of this strategy was the Instructables acquisition last year.

I don't know what they specifically plan to do with SocialCam but I'm sure it fits into this consumer community strategy in some way.
Prepare a hosts file as

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
127.0.0.1 reddit.com
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
etc

A shell script to rename the regular hosts file and this one at will. Add it in cron if you want it scheduled.
Interesting ideas, but I'm not convinced by your last point.

Amongst the people I know who swear with reasonable frequency, I don't see any correlation with lack of eloquence. Indeed, I can think without trying very hard think of published authors, professional screenwriters and famous Shakespearean actors who would fit into the "uses profanity reasonably casually" description.
what's the point when delivery time is still approx ~ 10 weeks+. I rather buy it on eBay and get it in the next few days.
Metro simply defaults to text as the basis of communication between the software and the user. The advantage is that this allows for localization both in linguistic and cultural terms - "save" translates into multiple languages and is recognizable by people who have never seen a 3.5" floppy disk or who are coming to computers for the first time.

It's not that designers cannot round corners or simulate woodgrain to their heart's content. It's just that it isn't necessary for developing software which fits within the overall design aesthetic...a designer can even use serifed fonts if they wish, it will just be more work than using the standard and probably to little benefit for the user.

Where Metro excels is in allowing the use of branding to communicate with users - e.g. Twitter and Facebook applications are recognizable by their logos - and Metro's simple aesthetic favors designers who can develop similar iconography for their products.
Metro makes no choices because it has been caught in the middle of Microsoft's "identity crisis": is it a touch/tablet interface or a desktop/mouse one? Microsoft is failing to make those hard choices and thus Metro is a reflection of it.

Furthermore, the lack of differentiation between apps is a bad decision in my opinion. It's hard to figure out which app/feature you're using without reading the titles/headers… I don't know about you but that doesn't seem like a good choice in an interface for a desktop/multi-tasking device. Again, Metro is being developed without a clear identity, hence my opinion.

But yes: it is my opinion and yes, you may disagree. Opinions are subjective. :)
The weakness of Israeli entrepreneurs is they don't get the American consumer
Basically all us entrepreneurs are the same, we don't become entrepreneurs to make money, we do it because we love to solve problems and create. I believe this program has the potential to solve a huge problem in our society and should be discussed by policy makers, drug companies, and pharmacies. It's right under our nose! People will bring back their old Rx's if you give them a reason to! We have been given clearance by the DEA and local authorities to run this pilot program, but we still need more funding. We appreciate the support!
I wrote a little shell script that makes it easy to manage host files for this very purpose. You can check it out here: https://github.com/theabraham/wrk
There was a time, not that long ago, where Yahoo! was in a bad situation. Their search engine was terrible, portals were dying and they were losing mindshare like you read about. The thing is, at the same time they were doing REALLY interesting R&D work (Yahoo! Pipes, YUI, etc).

The impression I get is that in the last few years between the cuts, layoffs and good people just leaving they have virtually no talent left to resussitate the company.

Am I wrong in thinking this? Where is all of this awesome new stuff going to come from?