skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More interesting that this is a Microsoft project and they are hosting their videos from YouTube. Haven't they built their own video streaming service?
I don't think the desktop needs reinvention. Enhancements and modernizations are great but our workflows are so refined at this point the cost of reinvention is ridiculously high. If you take away something that works for the user and replace it with something new they better be sure it's so much better the users are willing to throw away existing workflows and experience. I've yet to see anything that would justify throwing it all away. Within the constrains of keyboard/pointer input on a 2D display it's going to be tough to make that huge leap forward. I suspect the next big leap forward will be AI advanced enough to just eliminate the need for these carefully crafted workflows. If I could tell my computer what I wanted to achieve and let it sort out the workflow I wouldn't care as much about the UI. Even then I would still need a classic desktop interface available for tasks too complex to explain to the computer -- or too complex for it to figure out on its own.
If he "inherited" the inventory from a firm that no longer exists, it could very well be profit. Think of how debt collection firms make money.
Cz & Sk » The Amazing Mauritian Blue Bay
The entire post looks like an advertisement.
Wouldn't it be the other way around, if Hulu Plus subscribers could just use ML's airplay feature without an official app?
This Facebook promotional campaign (events + targeted ads) was successful, questionable accounting or no.
it is likely the email id you are trying to use is already taken up. If you scroll up a bit, there may a error mark near the email field (I had this issue and but was trying to change the captcha).
It'd be nice if Microsoft worked on their spam technology along with upgrading the UI.

Just logged in to my @live.com account - 4814 messages in my Inbox, 17 in my Spam folder.

Guess how many in my Inbox are legit messages? None.
As has been pointed out the 10k is revenue, not profit. At $3 a record I doubt there was much profit at all, though it sounds more like a liquidating event so it is still a happy result.

To the point of the article though, he advertised on facebook and people showed up and gave him money. Whether or not he is actually profiting from the business isn't really relevant. His ROI is clearly wrong, but the ads had the desired effect of bring in customers.

I really hope he doesn't report 10k in profit to the IRS though as he would then be losing even more money than he probably already did on that sale.
I sort of disagree. The UI is clean but things aren't where you expect them to be and it makes it confusing. For instance, I didn't know where to put the subject when I was sending my first email -- it's huge but it's weirdly placed and unintuitive. I also couldn't find the Send button at first because it's on the Nav bar -- not where I expected.

I also agree with the post below re: branding. I went to "Help" to see what they had and it took me to a windows.com page saying "This page doesn't exist" followed by "Hotmail Help". Nice.
Please actually read what I've written before making assumptions. I have used Gnome 3 for many months and found it to be a step backward in almost every way from Gnome 2.

I read through the release notes to confirm that I wasn't missing anything important in my own use--which I noted in the part of the quoted sentence you excised. I also said, in the same comment you're replying to, that I spent many hours trying to get Gnome 3 to a point where I found it an acceptable desktop environment, and failed.
Sold 3000 records fro 10k$. I bet he spent much more when he was buying all those records, say 20k$? So, I could read the story as someone lost 10k$ in 10 years because of Facebook ads.

And I'm sure someone creating facebook ad analytic service would claim that facebook ads are effective.
I completely agree. I woke up to some crazy long page rendering time on NewRelic and couldn't figure out what was going on... until I saw the huge backlog of mixpanel events on my db. Not only is it making page rendering slow, even worse, it's tying up my background workers for 30 seconds at a time, causing a huge backlog on ALL my background tasks.
Vice: Special Operations Forces Trade Show
Caveats:

I've used Redis once over an ssh tunnel (over a domestic internet connection that's everything but fast, it's a long story...). It is slow (as in agonizingly slow), even for a couple of queries, probably not redis fault, still.

One thing you really want to do in this case (described in the article) is to carefully select the encryption protocol for one that uses the least CPU or has the best data rate.

See: http://blog.famzah.net/2010/06/11/openssh-ciphers-performanc...
Seems a lot nicer than the dumb old Outlook Web Access I have to use for work.
Off topic but i though this was about curiosity's landing early next week.
Any time someone creates a proprietary computer program it restricts everyone's ability to freely interact with it.

This is exactly the point that I don't think can be justified unless you're nosy. Before the proprietary app was created, it didn't exist. By any practical measure, the distinction between a software developer not creating an app at all, and creating it but only being willing to share it under terms that are unacceptable to a given person is nil. Regardless of how you get there, not having the app is not having the app.

Proprietary software licensing is just a type of contract. And like any other contract, it only applies to people who voluntarily choose to enter into it. And the ability of individuals to freely enter into agreements whereby they exchange goods and services, perhaps subject to additional conditions, is an essential feature of free society. If nobody's forcing you to enter into the contract, then your freedom is intact.

On the other hand, pressuring those to whom the contract is acceptable to avoid entering it suggests a lack of respect for the freedoms of those who disagree with oneself. Just as assuming that someone who doesn't agree with you just doesn't understand your position suggests a more general lack of respect for those who disagree with oneself.
It's still personal if you can guess it. For instance, you might be able to guess someone's GMail username by their Facebook vanity URL or their Hacker News username. That doesn't mean you can post their email all over the place.

If it's not posted publicly by the person, it's private.
Why would you need to open up the ICs on the motherboard? Just plug in to that "thunderbolt" that's got people so excited, and DMA whatever you need.
The desktop really doesn't need reinventing

The problem is that the devices where the traditional WIMP interface make the most sense (desktop & laptop PCs) are on track to become a small niche in the overall computing landscape, thanks to the wild growth in mobile and tablet computing. While desktops and laptops aren't going to disappear anytime soon, they're not where the action is.

So if you're a maker of an operating environment, you can stick with an interface that's highly optimized for desktops and laptops, but that severely reduces the relevance of your work.

It's like choosing to make an operating environment today that only runs on IBM mainframes. Those mainframes exist, they're still out there, and you can still make money selling software for them; but that choice makes your product irrelevant to the vast majority of computer users today. And when you slot yourself into a niche, you can never grow larger than the niche you've slotted yourself into. If you want to be an industry leader, you have to be playing in the same space where the users are; you can't get any further back in the parade than the middle.

All the significant commercial developers of traditional WIMP environments today (which means Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical) are struggling with how to make this transition -- to stay relevant on the desktop while also extending themselves into the tablet/mobile realm. It's a big challenge, and it's not clear at this point that any of them have figured out how to do it yet. But they have to do it to stay viable as mass-market vendors.

I would imagine the pressure to make that transition is even greater on open-source projects like GNOME. If you're a commercial player stuck in a niche, that's not necessarily a bad outcome if the niche is at least profitable. But open-source development is driven more by developer ambition. Developers want to work on hot new projects that lots of people will use, not old stable projects for niche audiences. In a commercial environment you can salve their disappointment at being stuck with the boring old projects somewhat with cash and perks. That's less true in FOSS development. So the talent flees your ecosystem to go work on things that are more fun, and you slowly die by inches.
This article articulates so many principles I have come to believe in but have considered to be inexpressible. There is a LOT of insight here.
I (and I'm sure other HNers) would love it if you couldgo into a little bit more detail as to how your job queue is constructed.
I do use the JS api's and it was affecting my website. I was seeing a high number of JS errors and even worse, my users were seeing odd behavior because I was depending on your /track callbacks to fire and they weren't.

This is the second time you guys have had a major outage in recent memory and your status page looks like a christmas tree. I really do love mixpanel, but unfortunately I'm going to relegate your service in my mind to 'untrustworthy third party service' every time I write code against your api.

Also the fact that I found a pretty major bug in your loader code which prevents it from working correctly with IE browsers (https://mixpanel.com/docs/integration-libraries/javascript) last week and today you are still distributing the broken code has me worried. Do you not take this stuff seriously?
"Your password can't be longer than 16 characters." really?
I think he means a space elevator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
They don't allow the password to have more than 16 characters as well.
Oh wait so we shouldn't trust the guy whose livelihood depends on people buying FB ads when he says FB ads are fantastic and definitely not a scam cos they worked for him?

Oh.
This is why I queue all my mixpanel requests on the server. I'll just re-run them once it's back up.
You can see in the ads that the inventory came from his own business, so he must have paid for them at some point.
hm... that's interesting because I got an email subjected "Welcome to the Outlook.com preview"

http://i.imgur.com/UNhny.png

are you sure you're using the new outlook.com account and not an old hotmail/live one? if you have a password manager with autologin you might have gotten signed into a wrong account
Captcha problems aside, it actually looks pretty slick.

It's nice to be able to grab sync@outlook.com too.
I like outlook because to me usability and readability is better than Gmail.
Their documentation is either wrong or misleading:

Basic Javascript integration

We load the library onto the page asynchronously, which keeps your website loading quickly even if placed in the <head> of the page.

In our case just commenting out the library load solved all our issues.
One thing I've wondered about Windows is why it needs to be rebooted so often?

I can understand for stuff like Service Pack updates or patches to the kernel but it seems whenever I boot Windows 7 it wants to do a bunch of updates that inevitably require a full restart, sometimes this also triggers more updates so a further restart is required.

I've even installed stuff which seems like simple userspace software and have it demand a full power cycle upon completing the install.

Is there an actual intelligent reason for this, or is it just a throwback to earlier versions of Windows and hasn't been fixed yet?
I see a lot of people saying that you cannot analyze the data flowing through a system - and yet, I have to wonder, how then do people find the data they are looking for? It seems to be a rather fundamental theorem that if you know a URL to a file, no, there is no way to stop you passing whatever you want. But if you only have search, then surely the search itself implies that you have a way to classify the data!

Personally, I think this is enough to stop the spread (if not the storage) of horror. In other words, someone might safely store their cache on my computer without my knowledge (heaven help me) but I refuse to store anything that is searchable as a horror.
Yes, I was searching for an HTML renderer written in Haskell. It makes me remember HsExcel http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com.ar/2007/03/hsexcel.html
Generating a configuration list with PHP
Microsoft Did the Impossible: The New Hotmail Is Fantastic
You can use AWS Direct Connect (http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/) to set up a dedicated 1Gbit or 10 Gbit network connection from an AWS region to the location of your choice.
The best Apple advertisements
> Much of the text is a rote repetition of what has been known for years — with some historical weirdness, like repeat using of “we” to mean the USSR, which is not the most encouraging thing for Russians to do

I can sort of see why that's not encouraging, but what other pronoun would fit?
Outlook, like all of office, is the default choice of pretty much anyone in a non-tech office setting. These programs aren't just "chosen", they are expected.

The same way having a desk is expected.
I suppose you could. It may also help you out if you are selling a Facebook analytics system and you plug it at the end of your claim.
How is this innovative or modern? They don't even sprite their icons. Microsoft: don't waste my time.
Outlook.com doesn't allow passwords longer than 16 characters?
Brilliant marketing play for PageLever :) Not saying his story isn't genuine.. just saying it's a perfectly timed post targeted at the perfect audience for the product. He knows what he's doing so definitely not surprised he can put together a successful Facebook campaign.
Microsoft to Phase out Hotmail
Batik Sarimbit C13
Besides the Metro thing, what's so modern/different about this versus Hotmail?
Envy Labs Blog hacked
Google is asleep at the wheel. This makes them look bad. Gmail blew the doors off every other webmail client when it launched 5 years ago but it's time for a rewrite. The fact that they used Gmail mobile as their "Gmail Offline" product in Chrome tells me that the current client can't be modernized. I only hope that is what the Sparrow guys are going to be working on, because Microsoft isn't the company you would expect to be leading in HTML5 innovation.
Mail Yahoo screws the pooch with infinite redirect loop
Horrible. They don't sprite their icons, and it takes forever to load. This is Microsoft's idea on a "clean, fresh take on webmail?" close
The point about revenue != profit isn't very clever, though 1/3 of the existing comments are making it. The actual point is that he was able to successfully drive traffic to his event using FB ads. Every comment addressing profit vs. revenue entirely misses the point.
How do they determine the income of the readers?
I find it strange how people refer to a Windows RT tablet as an "ARM computer", but the iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook and a zillion other Android tablets(most of which have locked bootloaders, hello "Dangerous Precedent"!) are not referred to as ARM PCs.

It just shows how the terminology is changed to have a higher impact for an argument.
The parent isn't fixated on the word "widely"— you are. Your entire comment talks about how "widely" is a poor word choice and, in doing so, misses the parent's point.

Swap out the word "widely" with the word "intentionally" if it makes you feel better, but don't claim red herring when the word was obviously used in an off-handed manner.
Please don't anthropomorphize your vehicles. They hate it when you do that.
> our workflows are so refined at this point

Whose workflows and at what point? Do we think the children born today will be satisfied with GNOME 2 (or GNOME 3 for that matter)? I agree that we're playing fast and loose with the definition of "reinvention" here (and that GNOME 3 is clearly not a reinvention of anything--to be fair, he started it!), but I think there's room for better than incremental improvements in all facets of computing, including the desktop.
> seems like simple userspace software

It probably isn't.
> A piano that has not been regularly tuned will lose its ability to stay tuned

Having tuned pianos for about six years, I think this is a misconception. An piano left untuned for many years will certainly lose its ability to be retuned in a single tuning. Owners who try to bring it back into tune with a single tuning will fail, and think it can't be retuned. That's completely normal. What's more, retuning it correctly (evenly distributed tension) may be beyond the casual neighborhood tuner. But the absolute inability to be retuned is rare.

On the other hand, if the strings need replacing (sound dead, tinny, or thin, after as many as 50 years for good strings or as few as 10 for poor ones) or the tuning pins don't hold (long term lack of climate control), the piano probably needs restringing, which is labor and skill intensive and maybe not worth the time and money (from one to several grand) compared to purchasing a new piano (Costco has surprisingly good prices!) unless it has sentimental or collector value. But if you don't mind the expense, even with bad strings and tuning pins, the piano can be fixed and tuned.

Provided the tuning pins hold and the strings aren't ruined, a piano can generally be retuned in a patient series of 3 - 5 tuning sessions to gradually (with ample settling time between sessions) bring the whole (strings, soundboard, plate, bridges) back into well balanced tension.
How Startups Can Transfer Copyright and Intellectual Property Ownership Online
Startup launches to help other startups manage their copyright and intellectual property online.
Believing that the finish line is just yards away and finding that it is actually miles is not going to be good for your company’s morale.

I've learned this lesson the hard way. It's easy to get caught up in acquisition discussions, so be careful not to get ahead of youself. The cost for the acquirer to engage is much less. They are larger and sometimes have full-time staff devoted to M&A, while your startup's bandwidth is very limited.
Nice UI, very light and simple, seems to be running fast even on my netbook. I guess I will start to use my 15 year old hotmail account again, good to finally have an alternative to Gmail.

Only one thing: Microsoft, I know its really chiq and en-vogue nowadays to have some element with position:fixed; on every page, but please: don't!

There is no reason whatsoever why I would want to see all the time the titlebar. I mean, why would I want to see it? I know I am using Outlook! I know who I am! And it's not very often that I want to access the settings!

But, I guess, there is no way around it, position:fixed; is just soooo "modern".
And just yesterday there was a guy on HN claiming that FB ad clicks were 80% bots.
So both are pretty easy and neither is unrealistically impossible as the grandparent suggested...
The author points out that Limited Pressing should be using UTM tags and Mixpanel to track visitors to their site from Facebook, which was not at all the issue that Limited Pressing was concerned with. The issue they had was with paying for those visitors when they shouldn't have to.

As the author's current company is based on providing a layer on top of Facebook Analytics/Insights I could see how hearing that 80% of clicks may be bots could be disheartening, but there is no need to lash out at Limited Pressing for presenting their own perspective.
Playing Dirty: Twitter Lies, Then Hijacks Canadian Entrepreneur's Creation
It'd be nicer if Outlook.com acted as an Exchange client (not just an Exchange ActiveSync server). From the post, it looks like they're recommending people forward their email to a new @live.com email address. Bleh.
Of course you'll have to have presence in multiple DCs. I didn't mean to imply that one would suffice.

I'm not sure whether you've analyzed the bandwidth of the replication stream, but my experience is that if you've got a good circuit provider, you should have adequate bandwidth for 30Mbps+ streams, except under extremely unusual conditions, even over the open Internet.
There is no sane reason why Mixpanel can't give 100% uptime for a single .js file. https://api.mixpanel.com/site_media/js/api/mixpanel.2.js is down right now and that is the biggest part of the issue.
sidenote: what was your overall satisfaction with what was delivered , and did it live up to expectations.

I just find it hard to understand that people want to buy products on just a guarantee from a team, without reading any type of real world reviews from other people
Myth 1 is completely false. While companies will be careful about what they have summer interns write, they are absolutely expecting to get real value out of the intern's work. They are spending both money, and the time of the mentor(s) on the intern; do you think they are doing that for charity? Yes, you need to plan for the case that the intern doesn't successfully complete their project; that's why you have things like revision control and code review, to ensure that they don't do more harm than good, and you don't give them a project that absolutely needs to be completed by the end of the summer. Though at most places I've been, there has been more than enough urgent, mission-critical work that the existing developers couldn't possibly finish, so some of it does go to interns as it's not like the existing developers would have gotten to it in that time anyhow. I am mentoring several interns right now, and their code is shipping to customers already, in a core, mission-critical component of our stack.

Myth 2 is something that I'm sure that no one believes. Sure, people try to pick out reasonably scoped and specced projects for interns to work on, just as they do for anyone to work on, but that doesn't mean that they succeed, and I can't imagine that anyone would expect perfection. Furthermore, dealing with ambiguity, changing specs, scope creep, and the like is part of the value of the internship; you're going to have to learn how to deal with that eventually.

Myth 3 is about the only good point of advice here. It is difficult for a mentor to provide enough time for their interns. They usually have a variety of other things to do. But the interns won't be very effective if they sit around stuck waiting for help. Being assertive, and asking for help when you're stuck, will allow you to get a lot more out of an internship than just sitting around waiting for someone to mentor you.
Something like lzf or snappy maybe?
But they don't make money, so each new user contributes negative amount to the bottom line.

Grow it by volume? lol
Are you sure that measuring progress in version numbers is a good idea?
It's a pwn at GMail, by Microsoft. :)
Depending on length of time the network is "out" there's a avariety of things that could occur. In general, the master would kick off a bgsave and the slave would re-bootstrap once it received said snapshot.
It was on this page at least http://www.fidei.org/2011/06/boycott-nbc-removed-under-god-f...

Amusingly, Gary's email address is all over the Internet now. Couldn't twitter have just removed the offending message and saved themselves the negative publicity?
And on a side note, I'm not 100% convinced FB ads are going to be very efficient for a someone selling analytics software to multinational companies. So it'll be a different platform then.
Yahoo Mail Fail