skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it would make sense for Steve jobs to be angry if he was someone who never copied anything ever at all. None of his products were original, they were just improvised or 'inspired' (his alternative label for 'copying') versions of existing gadgets, be it the iPhone, or the iPad, or anything else for that matter. Its trolling at its best, like he says.
Rocket Science and the Law of Demeter
Personally, I'm a big fan of their short-lived 1980-1981 logo. I realize it has no place among today's clean, "Metro" look, but I love Metal and this just speaks to me. :)
Thanks for the comment. Right...that means no one has tagged that movie yet. If you want to tag it, you use the onlify tab.

The check for mainstream/non-mainstream does not exist yet, but will be there soon. I just wanted to see what kind of movies people will tag....and most of them turned out to be mainstream. I will clamp down the criteria soon. I will also nuke all the mainstream movies there.
I guess it relates to the issue discussed here a day or two ago about redirection ("am I suddenly Japanese" or something like that; should have been "think I'm turning Japanese" ...). The default.aspx could be an affirmation of the backend being used so that when you see that elsewhere you know the server tech is MS, a sort of advertising/brand presence decision.

What I find interesting is that the new logo is not on the en-gb or fr-fr pages in the header bar and they use the old Microsoft trademark typeface. They also use the old Windows logo on, it seems, all but the en-us page. Complete mess in terms of brand presentation.
To me this is another interesting example of Marc Andreesson's "Software is Eating the World" meme: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...
Whenever I see a new service launched with such a gross misspelling as "fowndr" to "founder", I cringe and place it in my mental "doomed" bin. Wouldn't this service be better off with a longer name or different TLD, e.g. "startupfounders.com" or "founded.co"? Is there any evidence for startup success based on a misspelled name?
I don't want to knock the community, but I can't stomach the spelling barrier each and every time I would like to tell a fellow founder about his community. "Just go to founder dot com! What? Oh yeah, that's oh, en, double-u, um. Yeah, and drop the e. Not loading? Nevermind, I'll email you the link tomorrow, or never."
>"What incentive do we have then, to not forcibly extract that wealth from the previous generation?"

We do have the incentive. And we will extract that wealth. But it takes time, since "they" currently have the political power.

What you describe is what is happening in the real world. Reform everywhere so they get the pensions and benefits, but nobody after them will. This is happening both publicly and privately. Even unions are stiffing new members.

We'll have the last laugh, though. Eventually the boomers will need to divest. At that point they'll find out we don't have the money to buy their assets.
Momo App Receives $40 Million in Funding, Is Alibaba Involved?
I don't like it either. Design isn't one of Microsofts strengths.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!

The reader gets involved in the making of the book, the writer gets a way to talk with their best customers, everyone wins.

A savvy author trumps a crappy publisher any time.
Portland's transit problems stem from the fact that most of the region's job growth over the past 20 years has taken place away from downtown. On a given morning, there are almost as many commuters driving to jobs in the west suburbs as driving to jobs in the city. Of course, the light rail doesn't go to where the jobs are in the suburbs. Not without the need to walk considerable distances or transfer to a bus.
I have a hard time seeing Microsoft as the hero anywhere on the timeline, but I take your point. ;-)

It's a very insightful quote, and I think it speaks to a truism of any long-lived group of people (from companies on up to societies), or any entity with significant political or economic power.
While praising IE, let us not forget that MS only innovated enough to displace other web browsers, leveraging its Windows near-monopoly to saturate the market with IE. Dominance achieved, competitors obliterated, MS was content to let the world live with IE6 for eternity, and only with the rise of Firefox and Webkit-based browsers did MS finally deign to do something (althought not much) for the web with IE9.
I think you have a point buried in there somewhere, but you're overstating it with so much hyperbole that you come across as a crank. Sort of like the LaRoucheites who used to accost people, panicked that Dick Cheney was going to nuke Iran.
Hacks for Democracy: a Hackathon for Elections and Politics
I don't think it's useful to compare minimum wage, which is a fixed floor, with the average cost of a new car, which will float upward if rich people buy more expensive cars. I also don't know why you would limit yourself to new cars, since the least expensive cars are typically used--and cars have undoubtedly gotten more reliable since 1980. They last a lot longer.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to do the research and math myself to tease out these relationships.
Interesting that 3 of the squares represent Windows, Office, XBox. I'm guessing the 4th square will represent Surface once it de-vaporizes?
Sorry, Ruby fans. There is absolutely nothing special about this. It's a basic iOS app that just bootstraps Cordova.

There are no Ruby idioms in use that save code over the Objective-C implementation. There are no blocks, map, inject, hash or array literals, etc.. Sure, you don't have to write a .h file.

The Ruby code here could be translated line-for-line into Objective-C and built with the standard toolchain, without another $200 toolchain. And guess what? You still need to know the Objective-C API to write the app delegate and view controllers.

RubyMotion makes no sense here.
So, in summary: the price of a new car has gone up a lot but wages have not, especially if you're young. I'm pretty confident that this might be a factor in why young people aren't buying new cars.

You're probably right, but that doesn't lead to a conclusion that the effect is caused by the economy.

In absolute dollars, cars are more expensive than they used to be, but for your dollar, you get much more car. That is, there are more features (stereo, A/C, power everything), more safety (both structurally as well as ABS, better restraints, etc.), more reliability, and much greater life expectancy [1] from a modern car. In short, it's a better investment.

If you've got enough money to meet the minimum threshold for buying a new car, you're going to get more for your money than you did in 1980. But that minimum threshold has definitely been raised. Part of this is from consumer demand; part of it (particularly in areas related to safety or emissions) is government mandated.

So it looks to me like the car market just evolved itself out of the reach of many young people.

[1] We just got a new car for the wife, trading in her old car at 200,000 miles. My car has 128,000 and is still running strong. In this age those numbers are expected; back then, a 200K mile car would be a minor miracle.
No, but I think that a business person with real money they spend on market research that says "people perceive the logo as old and out of fashion" might decide it was time for a refresh.
Well, I don't want to have to buy a Mac and buy a copy of XCode to make an iOS app either, but that's pretty much accepted. You can use whatever you want to create a desktop program. If this decision was about destroying competitive languages and software, that seems like a pretty big oversight on the behalf of these evil masterminds.

edit - georgemcbay points out that XCode is free. My mistake.
They want to short-form into long-form. They're going for increasing their piece of pie size. It makes sense, though I wonder if it'll hurt them in the future.
Well, that's a good point. When you do have to type, let it be accurate and fast.

But I'm too traumatized by nightmare memories of programmers cranking out code to take much solace in it :)
I knew a DJ who had a MD dash unit in his car. It seemed like the coolest thing ever.

I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was the one pictured in the article. I dumped the component quite some time ago. I can't bring myself to throw the portable away -- I've got tons of archives of my old college radio show on MiniDisc in a closet.

That particular portable depicted in the article was one of the last MD portables at all before Sony decided to pack it in; I think it came out in 2002. It had a USB input, and you could use your PC to push music onto a disk. It suffered from the classic Sony problem that they own a record label and they also make stuff that can copy music, so they made using it a complete pain in the ass in some misguided effort to protect their own interests.

You had to use the bundled NetMD software, which would transcode MP3s to the proprietary ATRAC compression format. Then you had to "check out" the songs to the device, in which case they could not be put on any other device until they were checked back in. It encrypted the stuff as it sent it down, and you could not get any digital audio back off the device -- USB was only one-way and it had optical SP/DIF in but not out.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4421897
How much could Haiku (BeOS) raise on Kickstarter?
Getting bought out by Apple is basically their only option for mainstream success on iOS because of the way iOS's keyboards are locked down. A keyboard like this loses a lot of its usefulness if every app has to implement it via SDK separately, because it is far better to have a consistent keyboard system across all apps.

So I'm cynical too but from a different angle -- Apple has already fixed the game when it comes to alternate keyboards (unlike Android where you can install 3rd party keyboards that work system-wide).
Unfortunately, that's just not the way people talk about dates here. Maybe it's because we use a backward date order, or maybe it's a self-reinforcing loop, but that just doesn't sound natural, even to me.
Oh man, in high school I bought one of the first "dot matrix" screened calculators. I hate to admit it, but I used it once to cheat in a "data processing" class on a COBOL test. Yeah, that makes me really old.
Being a CEO Is a Brutal and Lonely Job, But It Doesn’t Have To Be
Yes. You can explicitly turn off this behaviour by sending a “X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff” header for IE8+.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields#Comm...
Despite all the handwringing, GNOME just might survive after all.
Not only is it not forgotten, it still costs $110 new on Amazon.
Yes, the world is a big and poor place. But in the United States where (like other developed nations of course) people have the financial means to choose, the majority of phones sold are smartphones. And T9 is generally looked at like rotary dial.
Why open source hardware does not scale
I think MSFT is starting to get a little obsessed with the boxes - excuse me "tiles". I went to the store opening today in Boston, and I was pretty impressed. Very clean, bright, lots of screens.. made the Apple store across the street seem very conservative. We'll see if it ends up being a hit, but it is definitely standing alone as it's own unique store experience.
It's also important to point out that by "team", what's often meant is "founders". Mere employees usually have to interview for their own jobs and are often cut at the acquihire stage.
<devils advocate>Yes - it will encourage them to be more diligent in their work.</devils advocate>
> But to implement them, you need more than "a bit of framing and serialization".

I posit you're still grossly overestimating complexity based on your own experience with HTTP, coupled with grossly underestimating the complexity, time costs, and efficiency costs of the stack HTTP weds you to.

A TCP stream is simple. It's as simple as it gets. Load balancing it requires a few hundred lines of code, at a maximum. It only gets complicated when you start layering on a protocol stack that is targeted at web browsers, grew over the past 20 years, requires all sorts of hoop-jumping for efficiency (keep-alive, websockets, long-polling), requires a slew of text parsing and escaping (percent-escapes, URL encoding, base64 HTTP basic auth, OAuth, ...), cookies, MIME parsing/encoding, so on and so forth.

All this complexity is targeted at web browsers, introduces significant inefficiencies, and requires huge libraries to make it accessible to application/server engineers.

What's the gain? Nothing other than familiarity, as evidenced by your belief that the core of what HTTP provides is so incredibly complicated, and you couldn't possibly replace it.

No -- it's the complexity of HTTP that's complicated, not the concepts that underly it. Drop the HTTP legacy and things get a heckuvalot simpler.
Truth.

CarFax was pretty much directly predicted by Akerlof's "The Market for Lemons".
It's not a global sample. It's a sample of HN readers only. That means it's dominated by a population focused on web development, which means it skews heavily OS X and Chrome (and to a lesser extent iOS). Firefox remains popular among the general public, though it's dropping fast in the face of some really great work by Chrome. Obviously IE remeains popular too, and it doesn't even register on the linked chart.
Note that your “average price of a new car in 2010" is skewed wildly high for a number of reasons.

(1) The variety of mid-high end luxury cars (i.e. $50k+), and the number of such cars sold, far exceeds the choices available in 1980. For example, you now have a variety of choices if you want to drop >$50k on a pickup truck.
(2) We simply have more disposable income to spend on cars. That we’re so rich we can afford to spend a higher minimum wage multiple on a frivolous expense isn’t really a bad thing.

This of course also overlooks the fact that today, right now, you can buy a brand new car for about $7,200. (I just bought a Ford Ranger for about that, but there are numerous other choices in that range as well.) Even these very cheap cars are so much better in every tangible and intangible metric than even “decent” 1980's cars that it’s laughable. Step up to cars in the $15k range, and you’re able to buy cars that are better in just about every way, except for upholstery, than even luxury cars in from 1980.
Exactly. There will be sampling bias. Opera in particular makes it very easy to turn off sending referrer information (one click on the quick preferences menu), so Opera will be underrepresented in any data corpus derived from the referrer.
> Microsoft isn't changing their brand, they're updating their brand.

Semantics.

> it's not a sign of the apocalypse.

I'm sorry if I implied it's a sign of the apocalypse. I didn't mean it that way. The point is Microsoft has suffered greatly due to the massive success of Apple. This is no news to anyone. They're not going to die anytime soon, but they have a MASSIVE threat. The Wire's portrayal of the character's brand and that of Worldcom, are not a 1:1 match, I agree, but the theory is the same.

My point was to draw the real reasoning behind branding and why companies shift and update brands. I've personally been trapped in this before, and thought "God that logo looks like shit! That company, or my company, should change it! They would do so much better if they did!" Branding/Logo is about associations of an image with the company and its values. When the values of the company deteriorate, lack credibility, etc, than the association of the logo starts portraying those negative values (or lack thereof).

For example: How many people here think Google should change it's logo? The logo itself lacks any sort of design principles and very clearly was created by a techie with lack of graphic design. So why on earth hasn't Google changed it?

> Your assumptions about the reason for updating a brand are even wronger in the case of Twitter.Twitter's rebranding was them stepping up to an exclusive club of the worlds most highly recognizable brands.

I apologize, I wasn't aware that the logo before explicitly included the name. Regardless...

> Twitter's rebranding was them stepping up to an exclusive club of the worlds most highly recognizable brands.

8 of the top 10 brands in the world have their name in their logo...[1] What exclusive club are you talking about?

[1] - http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/07/top_brands/source/1....
I understand everyone's HP-10 series nostalgia, but to replace the TI-83 on that list would have to be the HP-48 series. Full graphing and programming capabilities, released 3 years before the TI-83, and of course using the all-but-forgotten RPN.
Nintendo's two consoles before the Wii were vastly outsold by their competitors, Sony's Playstation brand. The point that was being made: Nintendo suffered, at least in the past, because third party developers jumped ship. They may have had a comeback by going after a different market, but that's hardly remaining "dominant", unless you consider Microsoft's Xbox line a complete flop.
Yes you can; you just lose a dollar each time.
most of the region's job growth over the past 20 years has taken place away from downtown

I think that's central to the point of my linked citation.

People stubbornly insist on buying homes where they want to live, rather than where bureaucrats claim they should. For a transit strategy to have any success, it needs to address what people are actually going to do -- or at least not pretend that it is doing so.
Floppy disks, of the 3.5" variety, were way more useful than Zip disks to me. You could get huge packs of them for cheap and distribute your files with zip or rar, and every computer had the drive. With Zip you'd have to lug around your dad's lone drive with parallel port cable to use it on general computers and wait a year to copy your files. Sure I could carry around Zipslack in my pocket, but where could you boot it?!

Developing on floppy disks also taught me about embedded applications and operating systems. I built some weird stuff. Floppy routers, floppy X11 net terminals, memory-resident openMosix clusters, voice-activated car entertainment and navigation systems, rescue disks, minimal network packet filters, system management daemons, even CGI applications in C (which turns out to be a horrible idea).
The logotype would have been better alone. The symbol should have been the Windows 8 symbol. It makes me think that they used two teams and they didn't communicate during the process. Overall I like it, is refreshing.
Hah! That image is great. Oddly enough though, my initial reaction is to support Apple's claim for slide to unlock but scoff at them for "rounded corners."

I'm not sure why, I guess because rounded corners seem so obvious while slide to unlock is pretty ingenious, if derivative.
I'm in the demographic that this article is talking about and I nodded my head in agreement to everything they said. My attitudes about lifestyle and my relationship to driving has shaped my value system about new car ownership and home ownership.

When I owned a car it was simply a means to an end and not an identity. A method of getting from one place to another. Living in the city (I've lived in several) the car gets beat to hell, so having a new car is largely impractical without an off-street parking space. I also have absolutely no desire to live in distant cul-de-sac style suburbs, and I'd prefer to walk to the store if I can, even though I'm at the point where I'm thinking about buying a house and raising a family.

So whatever assumptions you're making about minimum wage or driving an older car or walking / biking are not applicable to me, and pretty much anyone in my circle of friends in the demographic which spans both coasts and multiple cities.
I can't get Swype to stop autocorrecting normal words to gibberish, no matter how many times I remove the gibberish word from the dictionary. For example, every time I type "do" it becomes "siop" and nothing I can do impacts this.
I'm surprised Windows users outnumber Linux users. I'd like to see a breakdown as to how this changes by time of day. I'd suspect Windows users are in second place because of the workplace. At night I bet linux gets a boost.
10x Insertion Performance for MongoDB with Fractal Trees
Circus magazine from 1970 - Which of these rock stars will survive the 70's?
Less than 1% IE users is great news!
It would be interesting to see all the source code that would be forced out in suits if this happened. Similar to all the cool design insight we have been able to glean from Apple v Samsung.

Also, Wordpress and Wordpress plugin authors would be very broke very quickly. :D
FWIW, I'm on the same boat: I bought 3, then 4, and now have to update to 5. They do have some discount (free upgrade actually) to those that bought it after some date however.
John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering
Are you happy to help your neighbours?
I am agreed with you but still codeka point is valid. Granted for a given X there would be low values of L that make the contribution irrelevant. What I differ from you is saying that X is static. Einstein might helped to get the atomic bomb working faster, but there are good chances that eventually it would come out anyway.

Anyway, discarding contributions in that way seems disingenuous in the best case. What would happen if Newton wouldn't invent Calculus? Well somebody else would invent it later but we should be thankful that that didn't take 100 years more.
I don't think "lean startup" means what the author thinks it does.
> Athletes with spinal injuries do not get that response.

Where does it explain why?
WebEngage is serving over 100 million widget requests per month
I think that the kind of Millenials this article is trying to describe (DC/NY/SF types) don't live in places where housing is affordable.

I'm pretty much a spot on example of what this article's describing; I live in DC where the average person in my peer group is still single, makes <50K/yr, and has student loans. A decent metro-accessible 2BR apartment here is 350K+, a house in the gentrified or gentrifying parts of the city is 500K+ (if school is a concern, make that 700K+).

This is COMPLETELY different from the experience that my friends back home in my small city in Missouri have, many of whom are married and buying houses for a song (<100K on 25-80K combined incomes).

The car thing fits this pattern too, a car in DC (and especially NY) is a total luxury item. A parking spot alone in my building is more than my rent was in MO. In MO, it's a necessity.

It's not that the author is right or wrong, they're just using a very broad brush to talk about a specific (albeit usually trend-setting) group of people.
Rubbish. Going back to September 2011 as I can't find any newer stats:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/40-percent...
> Personally i think there's a lot more to learn from seasoned developers ...

Thanks, but for balance, I recently had a conversation with a talented young developer who, unlike me, is fully conversant with modern times. I said, "How do the Angry Birds developers make money if they give away their app?" He patiently replied, "It shows advertisements."

My mid-20th century brain slowly wrapped itself around this idea: an application whose apparent purpose is to entertain, but whose real purpose is to deliver eyeballs to a vendor. Hmm.
People buying as much house as the bank would approve them for rather than what they could afford is what caused the first bubble. We bought a house for 2x our annual income 3 miles from work. We could have bought in a trendier neighborhood but it would have come with an unreasonable mortgage and an extra 1.5-2 hours of commuting per day.
<da>It would discourage anyone from writing a library or component that could be used in other software</da>
Parallels pull pretty much the same trick and will on Sep 4th when Parallels 8 comes out. For me P7 works for Linux and Mountain Lion, doubt I will upgrade.