skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did WP7 sell poorly because of its interface and styling - i.e. because the product itself was bad? Or did it sell poorly because iOS and Android are monoliths and MS was late to the smartphone game and - dare I say it - didn't put their full weight behind WP7 because maybe they had their eye on a more distant goal and maybe WP7 was just a warm-up for their full product-line revamp?

Do you really think Microsoft is so stupid that they would expect WP7 to become an instant runaway success against their competitors, without putting even a fraction of the necessary effort into pushing it? They're realistic about their products. How do you know that Microsoft didn't achieve all of its internal goals that it set for WP7? Visible market success is only one possible goal for a company as large as Microsoft, especially with a small and isolated product like WP7. And Microsoft has clearly been driving towards it Metro-revamp for a while now (Zune HD, WP7, W8). They're a big company after all and I'm sure they do analyse likely long-term trends in technology and make plans for how to navigate the future. WP7 is only one move in a long-term maneuver.
If Windows CE had everything well before iPhone came, why didn't Microsoft patent the stuff then?
Ok, two things. One, most of these games have been out on Windows, Mac, Xbox, PS3, etc. for a long time. Two, what about Android games?
One thing precludes the other, though. How can Android users be early adopters if apps are consistently released on iOS first?
Two paragraphs in: "Oh, it's Gizmodo. How the hell did I get here?"
I would not be surprised if suing Apple was a pre-condition of sale for Motorola.
4 Possible Cures for TV Interface Paralysis
Quoting from the article: "It's initially confusing but I have been using it every day all day since it was released and have got myself productive again." In other words, it's just like learning to use a different OS!
I always thought that was so you could catapult them into your mouth.
I think it's more:

"In other words, it knackered my productivity for a while".

This is not acceptable.

Also, don't forget Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft in the web platform team, so I'd say that is enough bias to ignore the article.
I can imagine it being successfully argued the other way by a persistent prosecutor. But considering all the fair use tests I think a reasonable interpretation is to let it be. Of course US law and judges are anything but reasonable a lot of the time, and if someone is looking to fuck you over there are plenty of ways to do so. I'd wager there are more than one patents being violated by this game (and the original it was cloned from) for instance.

The other consideration is that the developer is in India, which unless he's doing things on the scale of Dotcom allows him a "come at me bro" attitude if he felt like it. Fortunately he seems like a decent fellow, so it's a non-profit learning exercise of something with a lot of prior art in terms of gameplay, it's not a complete clone, and I doubt it hurts sales of the original (which he links to).

I guess you're in agreement with me otherwise?
Help, HN? inotify won't install using npm - node.js
"The new boss, Dick Costolo, realized that if the company wanted to make money, it would need to stop allowing all the food trucks and delivery services from taking everything made at Twitter."

This was not the only option.
I didn't notice because I had scripting on at the time, but it deserves another compliment, seeing as so few websites seem to bother these days.

(even for those who think noscript browsing is not with the times any more, it's still good practice to give a decent error message / explanation instead of breaking or blanking)
Third Coast Thunder: Chicago's Top Digital Companies [infographic]
And this doesn't even include multi-channel online retailers like Grainger, Walgreens, Sears etc.
Well, then there's no one to blame but the parts involved. For weeks they called witnesses and experts to the stand to explain the jury their claims. They should have bring better experts or explain things better. Also, both parts agreed on the jury during the selection process.
I don't think that HTTP headers are enough and feel that setting csrf tokens is the best approach to this. My reasoning behind this is that there are a lot of privacy plugins[1] that people use that interfere with the headers and using referer header is even worse because a lot of websites have redirection vulnerabilities eg if you want to be returned to the page you were at after logging into a website the url would be something like login.php?url=/page/id , a lot of websites do not sanatize this which would render this useless. It is also not an option for some websites that must have a function like this, a prime example of this is Youtube[2] which uses csrf token (hidden fields) in forms to mitigate this issue.

[1] - http://www.ghostery.com
[2] - http://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=http://youtube.com/page
Stealing someone's name and graphics is OK if you use a nickname?
You mean sort of like how PyPy is a JIT for only a restricted subset of Python?
Was a line-by-line analysis really necessary?
Caffeine, C Application Framework
Thanks! Yep, at the moment I've set it to only pick up English language tweets but I could potentially roll out other languages at a later date.
> Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

The iphone was not a smartphone when it was released. It lacked the ability to install ANY third party software. It was essentially a very snazzy feature phone.

Its success did not come due to its smartphone credentials, which are still heavily inferior to its competition. It's wholly owned to its design and usability.
There has been a lot of interest from the Linux community on MonoGame since the last Humble Bundle, this is great they are sharing their port. I wrote up a blog entry on how to use MonoGame in Ubuntu, and you could use those instructions here also - http://www.sharms.org/blog/2012/06/getting-started-with-mono...
I have an idea of creating an Intellectual Property tax (similar to property taxes) based on an assessed value of the licence. You would pay yearly to maintain a patent. Or, you could enter it into the public domain.
Apple also stole employees from PARC, some of which are still working at Apple. They brought their talent with them.
Thanks for the kind words - let me know how you get on with it (dave@recon.io)
Aha, thanks - good catch. Fixed!
I think you mean [+], the interface paradigm formerly know as Metro.
The problem is that it seems nobody actually benefits from reading patents when implementing ideas. First, if you read a patent you can be found liable for willful infringement, which can triple the damages. Second, patents are intentionally written to reveal as little information as possible. Drug patents in particular often do not explain a reproducible method for creating the drug.
In this case, no. It was a case against Samsung, not Google. And was about Samsung's hardware and their own implementation of Android.
No, he's definitely correct. See this Apple article for more information: http://developer.apple.com/library/iOS/#documentation/AppleA...
No, PyPy JITs all the Python by design. It also runs all the Python and JITs all the constructs. It does not make all the possible python magically faster however, but that does not change my point. A JIT for only a restricted subset of Python would mean that it segfaults/crashes/gives a wrong answer if you don't provide a correct subset. This is not true.
When I see this image from the article:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Wr...

I have to ask myself, how can anyone think this:
1. Looks good.
2. Is ideal usage of screen real estate.

And even this:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Wr...

Now you have a bunch of icons without text labels, how do you know what does what? Obviously the 3rd party apps are clear if you use them, but the main Windows apps aren't clear. For example, what is that purple icon next to the blue clouds? (And what are the blue clouds? Weather? or is the Sun weather?)
It assigns a sentiment score based on a large bag of words. I'm making improvements to it each day, and it's slowly getting better. Terrible at picking up sarcasm though, but I think most sentiment analysis tools are.
Either way, the consumer loses, and for what? Innovation certainly isn't any better off.

You have no way of knowing whether this is true. Patents could come with a host of disadvantages and drags on innovation and still be a net positive for innovation. There's just no way to know without a control group.

As long as we're throwing out opinions, I find it very hard to believe that the patent system, broken though it is, is anything other than a HUGE net positive for innovation. I'm talking about the patent system across all industries, but I suspect the same would be true for the tech industry specifically. Companies across many industries regularly spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to develop products that are primarily protected by patents. If we did away with patents, many of those investments would no longer be made, and the rest would be as shrouded in secrecy as possible. And secrecy is a patent that potentially never expires.
"before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR"

Some of us may have been, but technically speaking that's not true. Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Nokia all had high end devices available with large touch screens prior to Apple's iPhone release. What Apple offered (that was revolutionary) was an easy way for users of their device to purchase content. They achieved this since they required users to have an iTunes account when provisioning their device; and they got away with that because they already had many of the users in iTunes already.

Apple definitely made advances to large screen smartphones (ex: their touch screen was far better than all other offerings at the time, and remains superior to most alternative devices); but to say that it was the iPhone alone (a piece of hardware) that revolutionized the mobile industry shadows integral aspects of the legal and historical argument.
Ask HN: Why do MMORPG launches always go so wrong?
It's by now a cliche that on the first day of an MMORPG game launch, the servers will fall over horribly and no-one will be able to play.

But why is that? I mean, it's not like TCP/IP or server technology is exactly bleeding-edge stuff, it's not that the companies deploying this stuff are cash-strapped (we're talking about Blizzard Entertainment as an example, for pity's sake), and it's not like they're not aware of the problem (Arena.net, whose game Guild Wars 2 is in login server hell as I write, have done months of stress-testing).

So what is it that means triple-A titles with hundreds of millions of dollars riding on them still always go pear-shaped on day 1? Can anyone enlighten me?
I think some of the arguments in the video depend much on how tightly invention is defined.

Personally, I'd say that even if all components on a circuit board were already individually invented by someone else, as well as the process of combining them, a unique result would likely still be an invention in my eyes.

I'd also say that an improvement to an existing product very well could be novel enough to call it an invention (where that line should be drawn is quite subjective though.)

Furthermore, I'd argue that piecing together an already existing product through a novel process also could be classified as an invention. For me, it might even be enough to use an existing design in a new way or new field.

Thus, I don't think finding one preceding design is a good method in deciding that a later design isn't an invention. Which is not meant to imply that all Apple products are their inventions, just that sometimes the addition of garlic and cilantro (per the video) is novel enough.
Make sure to configure it first, you pretty much want to max out all the settings (and enable all the different tools) otherwise you will get underwhelming results.
Ugh. I don't know about the rest of you - that post felt patronizing. This stuff is complicated enough without layering on massive metaphors that shudder under the weight of the context they are trying to convey. It would be awesome if someone took a crack at a similar explanation without all the pandering.
If all you want is a better task manager, download process explorer. I still use process explorer on win8.
"If the browser ran bytecodes instead of javascript..."
How is this new? Similar services have been around for years already.
It also gets Apple more information on the developer, should the company ever want to track them down. A payment history leaves a wider and longer paper trail.

I'd also assume that Apple blacklists any certificate if the developer used some sort of fraudulent payment. I'd hope so, in fact.
> Just because something is simple - doesnt mean it is not innovative.

Just because something is innovative doesn't mean it isn't inevitable.

I believe capacitive touchscreen interfaces like the iphone's were inevitable. In fact, pinch to zoom was widely demoed before the iphone's launch. That doesn't invalidate the patent, but it does invalidate the idea that without apple it wouldn't have been invented.

Should the first on a market that was going to arise anyway get the monopoly rights on that market? If we were talking about a 5 year patent I could begrudgingly accept it, but to see the touchscreen device market chained to apple's whims for two decades cannot be anything but bad for the customer.
Right, the app doesnt have to give a Yes or No answer. There could be a it depends as well. It'll still be useful.
Thanks for the response.

1. This would be forging new territory for me too, which could be both a good and a bad thing.
2. This would require a message passing interface, which is not trivial to establish (i.e., they may not be able to test). This is where my skills are most refined and I would be able to defend my answer, plus, it links back to some of my work as an undergraduate (B.S. applied math, did research in numerical methods for problems like this) and shows how my graduate work has matured these core concepts, incorporating more theoretical and challenging CS. I don't know how much you know about solving partial differential equations, but a domain is discretized in time and spatial dimensions and a numerical schema called a stencil is applied as a discrete analogy to the continuous solution. This is straightforward if you are solving the problem serially, but is nontrivial in multiprocessing because depending on the stencil used a communication criterion needs to be established between the processors so that the information is at hand along the processor-domain boundaries.
3. This is probably the most interesting point you've made and I really appreciate hearing it; you're communicating a perspective that I hadn't really thought about, and it makes a lot of sense, especially given my mathematics background.

I think I may be best to tackle 2... Let me know your thoughts.

P.S. Another area that I am trying to sell myself is as an algorithm developer / analyst. These skills can be fleshed out in multiple areas, so I don't think it helps me lean one way or the other, but it is worth noting. Ideally I find a position where I can be part of a development team with a sizable research component.

-- Myles
"pinch to zoom" is obvious. It's practically the only way you could zoom things on a touch screen.

It's like patenting the steering wheel.

Don't pretend it's innovative or took any time whatsoever to come up with.

It's blatantly obvious and should never have been granted.
Capacitive screens were already used by one terminal, I think an LG phone. But the iPhone put something different in the market: multitouch and gestures. Some things like slide to unlock or pinch to zoom seem trivial now but they weren't really product of the normal evolution of phone interfaces. Locking the screen was done with a hardware button because it was deemed safer, zoom was double tapping in the part of the image you wanted to magnify.

Had the iPhone not been introduced I doubt small little details like these would have changed at all, and there are tons of these small subtleties in the current smartphone OSs.
Thanks for posting this. Your code combines two successful approachs : a latent factor model (SVD) and a neighborhood model :)

Here's my implementation of a recommender algorithm in C if someone is interested : https://github.com/GHamrouni/Recommender
I guess he's using NLP (Natural language processing) for that.
> My family, though ... I'm not so sure.

If, like my family, 90% of what they use their PC for is Word, browser, Outlook then they wouldn't need these tips or care about why you would want to use them.

They'd never need a menu option to shut down Windows because they've already been using the power button for the last 10 years.
Is it me, or does this ridiculous metaphor just make it much, much harder to understand? I'm pretty aware of what's going on with the whole Twitter thing at the moment, and I found this really impenetrable.
You might want to read up on HPHP. I've found that it doesn't offer the level of performance benefits most people expect.

Also there are a number of framework features you can't use with HPHP, like autoloaders.
As someone who primarily runs Ubuntu Linux and Mountain Lion, the interfaces and screenshots in the article definitely look pretty neat. I haven't had a chance to install Windows 8, and I definitely don't like the ideas about restricting the platform more. However, from an interface perspective, am I alone in thinking that it could be a positive change? (Maybe I am jaded from going through the Ubuntu Gnome -> Unity transition)
Foster as well as Piano have some very refined work. Foster is at his best when doing renovations and additions. He has a very delicate approach which is handsome and actually celebrates and enhances the existing structure.

I'm still waiting for some great Chinese architects to step up. They aren't given much room to flex their talents, however, due to the very brand conscious nature of the consumer. For instance there is a recently completed Ghery building here in Hong Kong with a flat on the 8th floor listed for $400 million Hong Kong Dollars, or roughly $51.5 million USD. Insane. But that's what the market is after.
Will the Real Crowd Funding Model Please Stand Up?
Nice to see someone thinking constructively about W8. Too many people have just been nit-picking, and I think failing to see what W8 represents: a radical first-step in a long-overdue next step in the evolution of computer UIs. People like us should be applauding Microsoft for their audacity, not obsessing over the details. Change is always complicated. W8 is just one step, one which Microsoft will continue to evolve. People complained when DOS was being replaced by Windows right?

It had to happen eventually. Windows 7 and OS X 10.8 are really nothing more than highly-polished iterations of the basic WIMP GUI. Apple has done nice work with iOS but seems loathe to rethink OS X beyond tossing in a few multitouch gestures. Enough has changed in computing technology, from processor power to network connectivity to interface technologies to the whole suite of activities people use computers for, that WIMP is really starting to show its age. And even more will change over the next 20 years - we should prepare ourselves for departures even more radical than W8. The WIMP desktop isn't the pinnacle for UI evolution. At least, let's hope it isn't! It is pretty clunky.

Microsoft, now in the weaker position to Apple, is the company to usher in that shift. We should be glad we have a Microsoft in 2012.
As someone who spends a lot of time writing, I want to grab this writer by the lapels and shout at him. The entire article amounts to a confession that his authorship adds no value! If his unique voice, his writing skill, his experience, all the things that go into his authorship, are less important than the word Exclusive in the headline or the temporal positioning of the article, then he's a shitty writer. A press release is a commodity, its marginal value is very low. A good writer adds something to an account of facts that you cannot get elsewhere, and that's what makes their authorship valuable. For examples, see Seth Godin, who is absolutely stellar on this topic. This TechCrunch guy has revealed that he's just a stenographer, just a copyist. I have no sympathy for him. He needs to become a better writer - and that involves hard work, which he seems curiously averse to.
"before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR."

Unless you had a Palm Pilot or a PocketPC. Stopped reading your essay after that.
FYI over at Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ysty8/windows_8_sh...

It seems shutting down just "mini hibernates" it does not shutdown Windows 8, you need to choose restart when installing updates.
If you would browse 1-100, then 100-200, changes are you are going to see the same links twice, and miss other links, just because the result set had changed in between the two requests. And caching a snapshot per user seems a bit expensive.

Pagination is a mess on Reddit and HN, so maybe he considers pagination "hard to get right"., since no social news aggregator gets it right.
The fall of Angry Birds
Have you ever been in the Stata Center? I think it is a really interesting place. Sure, they had a dispute over some leaks, but that shouldn't overshadow the building itself.
So Microsoft should be condemned for, after 20 years or so of WIMP, trying something really new?
Whats necessary for Entrepreneurs?
Exactly this.
I'm not implying I'm entitled to special handling, just stating the fact that this page, unlike any other with flash I've used in the last years, doesn't let me use my flash blocker in the usual way - I would have to whitelist the page.
I'm with you. I've been annoyed with reasoning by analogy and metaphor for a while now, because it's so often bogus.
The Win+arrow keys work in Win7 and are fantastic for developers, especially for those that work with multiple displays. Whenever I have to go back to Vista I miss those hotkeys the most.
I need a software that can print out money :)

Ok, seriously:
1) I need a CRM for influencers. Bloggers, journalists, etc.
2) I need Github backup service - weekly or daily.
3) Proxies as a service (sort of like TOR but with a friendly API)
Funny, at least they aren't getting a building that looks like a "like" button in the same way that Oracle's buildings look like database symbols.
I don't know if anyone has done it, but the Copyright Office actually have rules for it.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf
I find it helpful to avoid using the word 'you' unless the feedback is actually personal.
> On Windows 8, I just press Windows + (the letters w e a) and the search instantly finds the Weather app

Good to see that they got this done at last. OS X had spotlight for what, 7 years?
This doesn't just alert you anytime someone mentions your brand (like a Google alerts style service might) - this analyses tweets to identify mentions that you might want to act on, like tech support issues, feature requests and (y favourite) when a journalist mentions you.
Ended up finally finishing level 8. Was a huge pain but definitely feel so much better for completing it -- what a rush.

Yeah it was pretty tricky but once you get down the approach it's not too bad. Took me awhile to realize what was going on.
Scoble on Apple-Samsung: “this is actually a sizable win for Samsung”
Scoble, I think this is actually a sizable win for Samsung. Why? It only cost $1 billion to become the #2 most profitable mobile company. Remember how much Microsoft paid for Skype? $8 billion. So, for 1/8th of a Skype Samsung took RIM’s place and kicked HTC’s behind.