skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general, I think spreadsheets get "out of control" because they offer a model by which non-programmers can program. This lets spreadsheets "get out of control" in the sense that individual files become quite huge (even if they never get extended to inherently unreasonable tasks).

Digging deeper, why are huge files a problem? I believe it's because spreadsheets hide the manipulations they encode. This makes them hard to verify, hard to test, and hard to re-use. The larger the file, the more difficult it is to inspect and verify.

In short, spreadsheets present an opaque programming model, whose problems compound as the file size increases.

My personal solution has been to use command-oriented data analysis tools, mainly "R". Programs like these combat huge file sizes, and opacity, by storing vector-oriented commands, rather than vectors of cell-oriented commands.

To give a practical example, suppose you have a spreadsheet listing 100 employees, their hours worked, and their hourly rate. You want to multiply out the cost per employee, and add all those values up.

With a spreadsheet, you have 100 cells, each containing a product of two numbers, then another cell containing the sum. To verify the calculations, you would have to click through 101 cells, inspecting their contents.

With a tool like R, the identical operation would be something like:
employeeCosts <- employeeHours * employeeHourlyRate
totalCost <- sum(employeeCosts)

Furthermore, with a spreadsheet you may not really care about that column of {employeeCosts}. Still, you have to calculate them, and you have to look at them as you attempt to make sense of your calculations. So you can either: (1) leave the column along with all the other columns, making it harder to focus on the results you care about; (2) put the column on a separate sheet, making it harder to verify; or (3) do some visual trick like minimizing column widths, making it harder for somebody else to explore and understand your code.

A command-line tool, on the other hand, gives you lots of ways to avoid having to look at unwanted intermediate values:
(1) rm(exployeeCosts)
(2) totalCost <- sum( employeeHours * employeeHourlyRate )
(3) findTotalCost <- function(timeSpent, rate) { return(sum(timeSpent*rate)) }

The last solution leads to re-usability, which is where spreadsheets really start to fall down. Every spreadsheet I've ever been sent that links to another spreadsheet has been a usability disaster.

Once you make the jump to a real data analysis tool, the benefits begin to multiply. For exammple:
(1) It won't take 5 minutes to upload your files to an e-mail to send somebody.
(2) You can version-control your work.
(3) Your graphics will almost certainly improve in quality.
(4) You will find it easier to maintain "Single Point Of Truth"-- for example, the table of employee rates can "live" in a single file, which individual analysis scripts load as needed, rather than getting duplicated in every spreadsheet that needs the numbers.
How did you manage all those people? If there are so many people at the same time looking through your stuff, how can you be sure they don't run off and steal something?
> the interface looks very mobile friendly

How did you get to that conclusion? I'm looking at this main screenshot: http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/...
This is actually a really interesting point. However, its clear that absolutely any method of communication is vulnerable to the very same "social DOS attack," especially if we're imagining it to be perpetrated by the government.

Personally, I've spent quiet some time on the .onion network and never been ambushed by child porn. Don't you think your problem is solved on the .onion network the same way it is on the clearnet: with moderation on a website-by-website basis?
It says "Modern experience for modern browsers and devices.". Is that just an empty sentence or are they using a better engine? The paragraph after just talks about pixels and white space.

EDIT: More of the same, apparently: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/07/...
Yeah ! It doesn't look like outlook anymore. The UX/ UI is so fucking amazing.

Microsoft's target is to reach with 1 billion users around the world with newly invented Hotmail which I believed so far will never going to hit.

But with a new brand and some impressive features, Microsoft's Web email service might finally be cool again.
That sounds like an interesting idea. It might be helpful for spam-filtering too. Sybil attacks could be a potential problem.
So: Email integrated with social network feeds? That's kinda cool.
Adding more swap may not help depending in the workload. If you're using Resque then you need to process jobs faster than they are queued. In that case you also need to ensure jobs are queued on a new instance while the old overloaded one drains (very slowly).
Actually you are allowed to use grub2. The issue would be if you sell a device with grub2 pre-installed, and no way to install a user version.

Also, the other distributions could simply use Ubuntu's signed bootloader (So could rootkits).
I get where you're coming from, but I'm curious how you can evaluate a desktop environment from release notes. To me, GNOME 3 is a clear demonstration of the difference between features and design. Rather than adding new features, it focuses on making them fast and easy to use. I'm not saying GNOME 3 is perfect or for good for everyone, but I don't think it can be evaluated by its feature list.

For the record, I do think GNOME 3 is "substantially better" than previous versions, but I also understand that this is in no way an objective measure and it's perfectly reasonable for us not to hold the same opinion here.
Kids Don't Count in South Carolina: Ranks 43rd out of 50 states
The average gamer is 37 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_culture#Demographics

A game like dead trigger might attract a younger audience than that, but I guess we're still talking adults here.
Someone ought to sample those sounds.
This is a nice happy story, but how can you be sure the attendees came from the Facebook adverts and not word of mouth / recommendations that Facebook displays about events friends are attending? That seems much more likely to me as the source of your success.
Flexible sensor inspired by beetle wings as sensitive as our skin
One can recite the old adage "Prediction is hard, especially about the future" and laugh at these. But one important lesson that they give is that how hard to break free from the constraints of current thinking to be totally innovative. Look at the floor cleaning robot depicted in "Electric Scrubbing" and compare with the Roomba. The robot is essentially a mechanical French maid (now, there's an interesting thought), i.e. the manner of cleaning is exactly the same.

Another example is "A Tailor of Latest Fashion" where what seems to be a steam engine powers an automatic dress maker.
Cinnamon is a better alternative, since it is/will be default on Mint (THE most popular linux distro on distrowatch) and its built on GTK3 and the Gnome3 toolkits - which should be better supported going forward.
'But you also need to spot, grab and run with opportunities. Not many do. Don’t be that person.'

Seems like great advise, with the benefit of hindsight. The contrary position is risking spending your time with something that will never come to fruition, whilst the real opportunity presents itself elsewhere. There are no easy answers, at least none you can possibly pare down to a single statement.
Were you using https or http?
Microsoft to take on Gmail with Metro style Outlook.com
Or it's just that some people are rational about what it is worth feeling guilty about.
Looks quite fresh at first glance. Although I did have a momentary dip in enthusiasm when, after clicking "New" I discovered it was somehow leveraging Silverlight. But the cleanliness of the UI is encouraging.
So me and my partner bust these two guys on a B&E on the wrong side of the train tracks and haul their butts downtown to get confessions.

We separate 'em into to different rooms and really put the screws to 'em. We musta questioned 'em for hours because the sludge coming out of the coffee pot started to taste more like 10w30 than Folgers.

So these perps have all the answers, and we can't figure out how, because we got a strong hunch we got these guys cold. So we figure they're using quantum entanglement to keep their answers lined up. Each perp has his entangled electron, spin it right for yes, left for no, and up for maybe. So we turn up the heat and drop a Multi-prover interactive proof in their laps, and all of a sudden their stories don't line up so well anymore.

Another hour of good-cop, bad-cop, and we get one perp to roll on the other. Wasn't long till they were both singing like canaries and my partner and I had a couple of fat collars.

A job well done.
I'm pretty stoked about the potential video, myself.
Plagiarism is a common occurrence in India. There is very little original research work in universities and Intellectual Property laws are rarely enforced. Ergo, every two-bit college professor regularly "authors" books to supplement their paltry income. These are mostly marketed to their own students as a way to pass exams, and nobody claims to have done the original research. Guys like Rahul Tyagi and Ankit Fadia just had the chutzpah to believe their own hype. The real worrisome fact is that nobody in Corporate India knows enough about security to call out these charlatans.
Signup captcha appears to be case sensitive (or something??). After try number 6 I give up. Nice work, Microsoft.
What a terrible answer.

My advice is to go through introduction tutorials for both. You can download the developer tools for iOS or Android for free. You can test your apps on a physical Android device for free; but for iOS, you're stuck with the simulator unless you plop down $99.

Do you want to do this as a hobby? for me?

If a hobby, I'd lean towards Android, because it's more open and easy to deal with. I can interface with Arduinos or practically anything else without having to deal with licensing fees. I have more freedom to roam API-wise.

If for money, iOS hands down. Android may have bigger market share, but the money is still in the iOS App Store. More people buy apps for iOS, sad but true.
Brilliant!

Facebook events are a fantastic way to profit and you hit the nail on the head. Glad to see you succeed so well with that effort :)
The reason Outlook is the world's most used mail client is because people are often forced to use it to access their company email. While anecdotal, I don't know a single person that uses outlook because they choose to. However, hopefully, outlook.com can introduce some innovation in the space, although, I'm skeptical as I am with most Microsoft 'innovation.'
Microsoft lanches Outlook.com, introduces metrofied mail on the web
Such a shame that there will be very little 'curiosity' expressed by the general public.
I have this pre-ordered there. I just checked now, and it says it's available for pre-order. See http://www.amazon.com/Measurement-Paul-Lockhart/dp/067405755...
Congrats James & Sohail!
The promo video heralds it as email without 'creepy ads', but I signed up and without doing anything it displays 5 ads from restaurants in my town.
Society would fall apart if things weren't regulated. Imagine having no building codes.
>> To the geeks this is "just android in a box" to everyone else this is a gaming platform that comes with a lot of games for free and is dirt cheap

I personally like Ouya, but realistically, the second part of your sentence should be "to everyone else this is a gaming platform that they haven't heard of". Only the nerds really know about Ouya, Joe Q. Public probably won't hear about it unless the nerds who bought the first wave can make it go viral.
I have implemented the changes related to your comment using django's built get_or_create function. Thanks
My wife and I had a similar naive acquisition. After tuning, re-tuning, re-tuning in 24 hour periods we got close but I figured something about the age, possibly the method of transport compromised it's ability to hold a tune. Now what to do with this 400 pound object in our 6th story apartment...

http://mrsamberapple.com/piano-desk

We made a piano desk. Took about 2-3 days to complete. Typing on it now matter of fact! :) Be happy to answer any questions.
It looks a lot like Windows Live Mail, MS's free email client (and RSS feed reader).
Ttycast: a terminal-to-web broadcasting utility
That's not the interface I'm seeing. Maybe they're doing device detection.
I came here to also complain about the CAPTCHA. I almost gave up after the 4th try but I really wanted to see what this was all about. I don't know what they are thinking with that monstrosity.
> Apple are trying to sell Macs to people who are afraid of clicking unfamiliar icons, people who don't read dialogue boxes.

That means they want an easy experience, no?
It's pretty horrible if you lose a hand-made instrument, because even if it was insured, you're never going to play something that plays exactly the same again. (This happened to me a few weeks ago with a flute.)
I see -- I can understand how that might be a concern. I'm not sure it's really a valid moral issue, but I can certainly imagine it bothering people.
That's an interesting line of thought, but then where's that other sort of content from more repressive societies, of which are are many?
Facebook Stock Crash Destroys The Market For Pre-IPO Stock‎
Its definitely faster than the gmail interface.
Then why did you mention it at all?
It looks like it's his back yard. Seems like it would be simple enough to simply stand at the entrance and make sure nobody walks out without having paid.
It's more complicated than that. FTFA:

> He quoted an NBC spokesman as saying: "Our social media department was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it."

So yeah, a complaint was filed, but the alleged violation was initially identified by Twitter.
I've backed 3 kickstarter real-world objects - the Cosmonaut stylus, the Elevation Dock (the first $1M+ project), and U.S. made underwear. The Cosmonaut stylus was two months late and blew past its touted it'll-be-a-great-Christmas-gift deadline. The Elevation Dock is 4 months late and counting. Even the underwear looks like it'll be about 3 months late.

And these were projects for things that are "dumb" objects. I don't expect the Ouya to be on time at all.
It can pull that off without reading your mail, which has been Microsoft's primary marketing complaint re Gmail.
JCPenney to get rid of check-out counters and clerks RFID chips
That's not what the site actually looks like for me. I just get the first 2 columns, and the second column changes to look like the 3rd one in the screenshot, when I click on a message to read.
Who's Winning The War On Piracy?
Just want to pipe in and say this is a fantastic resource. It's a great place if you have random questions like "Is it better to do this... or this?". Posting lets you tap into the collective previous experiences of tons of fellow UXers, which I've always had a good experience with. It's also nice for just browsing and getting little tips on ways to design.
Painting a target with canvas
Those friends wouldn't have attended if they hadn't seen the ads, right? At least some of them must have clicked the ads.

If Billy is the only person who saw the ad and clicked "yes, I'm going", and 299 of his friends show up as well, I'd say that the ad is the original cause of 300 people showing up.
A sudden stop or reversal in the popularity of HN would do the site some good.
If we are discussing potential solutions, maybe friend of a friend-network could somehow help thwart this issue. Even if CP etc was traded in the hypothetical foaf-network, it hopefully would remain in an isolated island of sorts. Anonymizing foaf-network could be bit of a challenge though.
How is that not a side-effect of the ads?
I really don't get where the line is. Which of these are art, which are code?

1) A Windows Metafile (A list of commands to send to the windows GDI API, used to store images, but may also run code)

2) An SVG

3) An SVG that is programatically generated animated with Lua

4) A demoscene type demo

5) A postscript document

6) These postscript documents: http://home.thep.lu.se/~bjorn/postscript/
As others have pointed out, no SaaS provider will guarantee 100% uptime. You are blaming a very poor design on your part on a 3rd party service. Ironically one should be far more concerned about using your startup for anything than using MixPanel.
I think it will be a hard fight for mindshare, but Microsoft brings a ton to the plate. The Skype play could really gain them some ground.

As I think about it, Office was sortof like the original mashup (but applied to the desktop space). When they started integrating everything into Office (including the OS and the web browser) it started falling apart.

What I see with outlook.com is another mashup concept, but this time it is a very natural fit: the web is basically meant for this sort of thing.

And another thing: I use Skype. I am typing this on a mac, but I do have that one MS-owned property installed (Skype). This could be a vector that MS uses towards greater mindshare.
I think the type of people who are interested in old records probably aren't the type of people who would consider shoplifting. I'm not saying that there is no possibility of it happening, but if I was running the event I wouldn't be too worried about theft.
> calculated ROI, 2000%? 3000%? You do the math.

We can't, because we have no idea what you paid for those LPs when you bought them. $10 each? You're confusing turnover with earnings (and "we're" with "were", btw).
cross-post from another thread because HN tends to bury things:

Wow. Very interesting. At first glance, the interface looks very mobile friendly and also very simple.

I'm incredibly impressed. The only feedback I would give is that the buttons in the top bar could stand out a bit - maybe a different shade of blue or a slight border. It wasn't immediately clear to me where 'send' was.

The ads are a bit more obtrusive than Google Mail ads, though I think that would just take a bit of getting used to.

I'm impressed as fuck, though. I can't explain how impressed I am.
Microsoft launches new email Outlook.com with unlimited storage, built-in Skype
So revenue equals profit now? You didn't "make" $10k, you sold 3000 records for $10k. I'm assuming those records were not created out of thin air?
I'm put in mind of Larry Wall, although I don't know whether he is a "theoretical" linguist.

Also, my father has told me (being more of that generation), and I have read, that many early entrants into the CS field had backgrounds in linguistics.

That said, the described Google policy of degree trumping ability, I find disappointing.

However, from a point of analysis, it's a simple filter, and after applying it, a "premier" venue like Google will still have a significant oversupply of highly qualified candidates.

But... it puts me in mind of Google's reputation for support: You only get a response if you're one of "the important people".

Don't count on your "looks", Google; they don't last forever.
Well I'm not sure about you, but my hotmail id works with this. Unless, you don't have a hotmail id in the first place... in which case, ignore this comment.
Lots of talk about the gross money coming in. But it seems to skim over the fact that there's a real product being exchanged. Records being sold at $3 seems like a bargain, but what was the cost of these records to begin with?

Sure you made $10,000 in sales, but that's not $10,000 profit, and definitely not a ROI of 2000-3000%.
Here is a quote from one of them:

"Yes, I do remember why I liked things in batches. Facebook suggests things for you to like in the right column on some pages. As soon as you click to like one of them, it replaces it with another suggestion. I’m quite happy to like thousands of things on Facebook as it improves the kind of stories and ads that come up in my news feed and again in the right column. I would rather see things I am interested in than things I’m not."

A little different than the typical idea of a Reader's Digest granny who doesn't understand the internet. Unlike the problem with display ads, in this case Facebook's UI purposefully encourages clicks based on user intent that is highly unrelated to the ad itself. Plus, as a FB advertiser you can actually see the profiles so you can see that these folks are heavy-duty clickers...and if you check the numbers carefully, you can also see that FB invalidates some of the clicks from the folks who like your page, since at some point the behavior is clearly indefensible. However, FB still leaves them attached to the page, since in the end FB can't tell if they really meant to click on your ad or not. And they don't appear to go back and invalidate previous or subsequent clicks from that invalidated user. They just trim off a few.

I consider this unethical business behavior on the part of Facebook. And since I also believe in caveat emptor, I wanted to make sure to get the caveats out there for any emptors who are interested.
I certainly see links to it fairly prominently displayed on the Tor onion network, which I know would drive off at least 75% of users.

What I'm saying here is that there's an interesting unsolved problem and that this problem might be the thing that's blocking the adoption of these technologies.

It's also a critical mass problem. I don't think you could run that sort of attack against the Internet because it has over a billion users. Once the network reaches a certain mass, it becomes far less of a problem. The problem is that CP-wankers (and possibly attackers) instantly colonize darknets, rendering them quickly polluted before they have a chance to escape their nascent phase. Like I said in another post: you could apply game theory here.
If he'd claimed "I understand CT and it didn't help my understanding of FP in the slightest", I'd have no qualms. The problem I have is, what he's saying is essentially "I don't understand CT, but I'm having no problems with FP without it".

Here's an analogy. There's an apprentice carpenter who has been given some tools and as far as he is concerned the tools he has been given are all of the tools in existence. It's quite clear that if he was given a new tool, he could immediately establish whether it was useful or not. He could not establish, however, that he has access to every useful tool.

From his account, I don't know whether CT is like a hammer that he is using upside-down (needs explanation before it's useful) or a banana (never going to be useful to construct anything).
So, wait... If I sell my car using a Facebook ad, I can claim I made $17k in one day?
HTML5 Spelunky Port
There are 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 possible SHA256 hashes, which is a few orders of magnitude away from the number of atoms in the observable universe. The chances of an accidental hash collision are vanishingly small.
An Epic Bill Gates Email Rant
Decent point, but the records were a liability for him, their value to him was probably ~0. From that context the revenue was almost pure profit.
You brought in $10k in revenue. That's not the same as "made $10k", at least as I understand that term.
Tim Cook's email is widely available because of people other than Tim Cook posting it without asking permission, much like Mr Zenkel. I could guess all the other NBC executive emails too. Since emails usually bounce when incorrectly addressed it's very easy to get the format for any company. The more important information in the Tweet was that this was the specific executive to contact. I might have tried jeff.zucker@nbcuni.com because I didn't know any better.

If I was an executive and someone publicized my First.Last@company.com email address I would not be upset in the least. I'd be more worried about the reason I was getting heckled--my job performance.