skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows Update is very configurable, both through AD policies and on a per user basis. If a machine shouldn't be auto-updating, set it to manual reminders. Plain and simple.

As for updates, in my experience they are generally small and fast to install once you have gotten over the initial update push of a clean Windows installation.

And of course in domains, you can setup custom update roll outs, no need to use MS's update servers.

Finally, for servers, install the OS onto an SSD. Updates will take seconds. Problem solved.

While it would be nice if more components could update without restarts (and I think people forget how much better things are now than they used to be!), the fact is every major piece of software out there requires restarts to install updates. Of course there are awesome-cool Linux and other OSs that do not require restarts (IBM obviously has had that tech for ages, really cool stuff), but with how Windows is designed (back-compat first), that isn't likely coming any time soon.

I've also had long running work disrupted by Windows update. The simple solution was to check "Ask before installation". Problem solved.

(And to be honest, Browser restarts are just as troubling to me now days as rebooting my entire PC!)
This. I cannot help but think "old-fashioned" when seeing an iOS UI. It is smooth and functional, but it looks a bit from the seventies.
I wish Google would force manufacturers to stop using the 320x240 resolution. The browsing experience is very poor on such a resolution, unless you're using Opera Mini perhaps, and I imagine it's hard for developers to refit their apps for such a small resolution, too, as even menu text will take a lot of space on that resolution.

I also wish they mandated everyone has at least 512 MB of RAM in their phones, and at least 2 GB for the OS and 2 GB of app space. That way upgrades can be ensured for years, and people, especially regular people, can actually install more than 5 apps without running out of space (and no, App2SD doesn't count, and it's almost useless). And while they are at it, they should also stop supporting the ARMv6 architecture, now that the ARMv7 Cortex A5 and next year Cortex A7 are going to be used.

If Google wants to bring down the hammer on manufacturers, it should be for stuff like this, that ensures users of Android devices, even at the very low-end, get a pretty good experience, otherwise they'll always think Android devices are crap, after their first cheap Android smartphone. They don't want that kind of perception to affect the Android brand in the long term.
Those are nice numbers, but how is engagement?

I only visit Google+ because my admin didn't bother to block it, but nobody in my social circle uses it, so I only have it to follow some funny pictures, lifehacker and stuff (kind of a RSS feed).

Reminds me of Hotmail, which I check once a month or so, much like many people I know which still has an account, but I'm sure Microsoft counts me as "active", compared to Gmail which I check a zillion times a day.
MongoDB is disproportionately liked by the inexperienced. There are things to like about it, and being able to have sparse secondary b-tree indexes on arbitrary data is, overall, pretty rad. For prototyping, being able to just toss some shit in there, especially when your data comes from an external service and you're not in control of your incoming data (very common these days), it works great for simple use cases and CRUD apps (which is a lion's share of new projects in the industry of the Internet). Being able to predict all the incoming data ahead of time isn't always doable, because a lot of services have underdocumented APIs, and every now and then you'll get data that's just ever-so-slightly different than what you expected. With Mongo, you can at least guarantee you're holding onto that, so that you can use this existing data in the future. That's way less contrived than it sounds. E.g., a third-party changes one of the data formats, adds a field or changes a datatype on one, for instance. If you have a strict schema, you might fail to write some of that data until you update everything. With Mongo, you can at least capture that data and get it working later.

I'm using it on one of my projects, and as I said, there are things to like about it, but graph traversals remain problematic. Overall, I'd say I'm pretty unhappy with MongoDB, and I wish I hadn't chosen it; it doesn't work well for my project. A lot of things I'm doing boil down to performing some kind of graph traversal, which is painful to do at runtime in Mongo (the potential solution space is too large to be precomputed). From what I've seen, MongoDB hasn't been working for me very well with a highly-connected data set.
Why the new iPod nano is interesting
Path is gorgeous on Android, I like to just look at it.

I just wish I had more than one friend actually using it. Heh.
I agree, it is too bad that CS has so many optional ways of doing things. That said, it is possible to write unreadable code in pretty much any language. If you have a good style guide and stick to it, it is easy to avoid all of these issues.
Is Marissa Mayer Restarting Yahoo Search?
We have had 3.5 - 4 million years. Whales evolved from mammals which went back into 'sea' .
Whoops; thank you. I didn't know that.
The problem with your argument is that all problem will look like it will have polymorphic and ambigous data until you have mapped it out properly. What the post you replied to was basically an advice for new projects and developers to fully map out the problem and see where things are going.

It is a lot easier to start strict and organized and back down to less strictness with looser rules where you need it, than to do the opposite.
I don't understand your point.

I switched to Android, and so did everybody in my office, yet nobody feels compelled to use Google Plus.
It really irritates me when the titles get changed after a submission gets popular. Now comments like this one lose their meaning since the original title has changed to something completely different.

If it's a bad title, it's a bad title. Just leave it alone. Bad titles will be corrected in the comments (like here) or won't be upvoted in the first place. Just stop messing with them.
There's a variety of reasons, for example recruiters can engage in activity of legal dubiousness such as buying employee lists off disgruntled employees or using phishing techniques to get the same.

It's also much cheaper for the recruiter because they're representing a range of different businesses. If the person they're calling isn't interested in a particular role they're pitching, they can pitch another role hence the ROI of each call is much higher for the recruiter than for an individual business.
I think maybe you are reading too much into what people post online. Some people simply share more than others or share different stuff.

For example, here on HN some people link their profiles to their real life identities and talk about stuff that they are working on with their startups or side projects or whatever.

You also get a lot of people like me who post under pseudonyms and just use HN as a platform for ranting about mostly trivial pedantic stuff as a bit of fun.

That doesn't mean I'm not working on stuff, it just means that the stuff I'm working on I don't really feel like talking about them on here. And I don't want some silly comment I write on here affect the stuff I am working on.

The way I write HN comments is completely different to the way I would write a publicity piece for something I was working from for example.

Of course if I was applying for a job I would provide as much info as possible on what I am working on, on my CV.

Basically a CV is a way of saying "here is everything I think is relevant". Perhaps that does give you a one sided view of somebody. On the other hand if your potential employer has access to everything you write online to your friends, then there is a strong incentive not to write anything online to them at all, lest some stupid comment you wrote at 3AM whilst drunk get taken out of context.

There is also the question of which profiles of somebodies you want to see? Maybe you want to see their HN profile, but what about their 4Chan or Reddit account? What about their online dating profile? What about the profile they set up some gay cruising website? Where do you draw the line?
There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats, particularly the "active users" one.

To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at most a few people who occasionally post to it, and recently I've seen many switch to Twitter.

Secondly, although not a perfect proxy, Google Trends shows an exponentially decaying trend that is hardly in line with their reported exponential growth:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...

Here's a zoomed-in graph in the last 12 months clearly showing the decaying tail:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...

Let's compare for example with Twitter (~140-200M actives) in the last 12 months:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...

Regardless of how you rationalize people searching for "twitter" vs. "google plus" as a proxy for active users, the decaying trend is clear. And it's hard to think of why the query "google plus" or "google+" would be 50-70 times less popular than "twitter" other than low the popularity of the service.

Of course none of this is hard proof, and it's possible that my circles are just not representative of the internet as a whole and that Google Trends is a fantastically erroneous proxy for popularity, but personally I believe they're using an unrealistically optimistic metric for actives.
Hey Patrick - great interview. I bought Ramit's earn1k course about 1.5 years ago and I have to say it helped me quite a bit. I was able to land an author who has sold over 2 million copies who started a non-profit company, as well as a lawyer, among other clients.

However, I've made (and am still making) many of the mistakes that you both talked about in your interview, so it's a great reminder to pop into earn1k and rework through some of the modules.

As a side note, I also used the principles behind earn1k to launch a physical product business in my local area and the biggest tip I took out of earn1k was to not do ANYTHING that was an indirect way of getting clients. It's been two months and I already have 5 of the best restaurants in my city as clients.

Thanks for the call!
>I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc.

I see that as a bad thing and I get irritated every day especially on sites where I need information real fast, like the DMV, police, car insurance website, company careers page or address etc. Mystery meat navigation, especially on hover abounds on the web.

Especially when I am on a phone, quickly getting the info I need for websites and apps is much more important than some slow loading website with 800KB of slow Javascript and retina sized images wrapped in byzantine navigation.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html
I've been transfixed with the idea of 'Digital Comparative Studies of Cities' (or some similar turn of phrase).

With the advent of mapping projects (GoogleMaps, Openstreetmap, etc), environmental sensor networks (my startup's area), and cheaper LiDAR arrays (for point cloud mappings of buildings and terrain...now in CMOS form) - we'll be able to quantify the homogeny of surbanization, architectural 'themes', road uniformity, development rates, etc over time.

There are lots of similarly clever projects cited on BLDGBlog [1] if you're into this kind of thing.

[1] http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/
Depends on a few factors.

- What is strike price of the option?

- What is the expected market value of the company?

If a company is valued at $1billion dollars and has 10 million shares, then each share is expected to be worth $100. This is a rough estimate, and assumes that the valuation accounts for future revenue, violatility, etc.

If you have options that gives you the right to put (sell) the shares at $150, then you are making $50 on each option, since you can buy your $100 share in the company and sell at $150, guaranteed. 1,000 options would be $50,000 profit at that share market price and stock option strike price.

This means you can expect the option to be worth $50, except that options typically have a date at which the options expire. The price of the option changes relative to this date, and is worthless after the date.

This is also dependent on you being able to exercise your stock options, which is unlikely unless the company is being publicly traded. A series D funding means the company is still privately traded, and the market price isn't set yet.
Humorous post. I can't say that I am surprised by Paris dissected. All those small streets and alleys creates a lot of small segments and those small segments, when looked from above, will seem monotonous and all in the same shape. It seems that it is mostly the larger segments that are oddly shaped and that is not really surprising.
Or, there are different opinions on how things work, each finding their language superior in writability and readability.

There are no absolutes. This is all subjective.
I was skeptic whether this is a real project, or it is just a parody/trolling site/project.
Matching Cards Kids App Acquired for $5,000
We have robots.txt, humans.txt, business.txt

so whats wrong with jobs.txt

Parseable, searchable, uptodate (one assumes, and can easily be deprecated) and simple to throw up a cottage industry around.
Apple is now as annoying as Microsoft. They have attracted the type of users who will put up with anything.

Business logic dictates they will do what they can get away with. If they can sell shoddy product (that looks good in the commercial or in the store), then they will do so.

Savvy users must suffer, or find a new system to use.
Political campaigns will be hit with $16,000 fine for robocalls
It is true that designers and tinkerers are probably happy to interact (and 'play') with all of these different interfaces.

But people that don't care about computers the way most readers of this site do aren't happy to be surprised by every new application. Consistency means comfort; even for websites, many of those aimed at general consumption (think newspapers and magazines) aim for simplicity and consistency.
No - looks like it's based on Nokia's Location Platform.
I'm definitely not here to slander, especially since I really enjoyed the parts of the book you have completed thus far, and will recommend it to everyone scaling PHP once it's complete. You obviously know what you are talking about, and your writing is clear and concise. But come on, between that quote and the delays...

And to defend myself, I just checked, and have no emails from you since June 8th (yes that was a personal one from you which was appreciated), including in Spam. The only emails I've seen are from upset people asking what the deal is, via github comments. Perhaps there is some problem with the emailing system? Is there some other newsletter link I missed?

And again just to reiterate, the content of the book so far is great, and I will recommend it, however I know I am not the only upset customer.
Oops. OpenStack board member says letting VMware into project was a mistake
He's running a web server process w/ Metasploit, configured to serve/run the exploit module. Then he issues a GET request to the server w/ the affected browser and gets a session in Metasploit (framework). The screenshots are basically proof showing that the session (connection to compromised machine w/ high-level/root access) has been created.
I agree that there are numerous inconsistencies. I just have a different definition of "trivial cases" than you do. The kinds of things you mention -- real issues that come up in real applications -- fall outside of what most databases are doing in the kinds of web apps that I work on. I haven't had to deal with Oracle vs. SQL Server bulk load problems or Oracle's unique implementation of NULLs in years. Not waving them away, just saying that these kinds of issues are not all that common because most real-world databases are trivial cases.
This film is very different from interlaced video. Interlaced video fields (the two parts of a single frame) are captured at different points in time. This film has frames captured at different points in time. The similarity ends here.

With interlaced video, the two fields make a single frame. With this film, every frame is displayed three times: First, with the two frames that precede it; next, with the one that precedes it and the one that follows; lastly, with the two that follow. Every frame (with the exception of the beginning and the end) would be displayed three times.

Now, we can certainly create our own "full color" frames by successively combining every three frames (1-2-3; 2-3-4; 3-4-5; 5-6-7; e-t-c) but now, I believe, we either have to have some intelligence in software to find parts from other frames that can be moved and morphed to align with preceding frames; or we need a human to manually move and morph these bits of each of our new "frame."

Not precisely the same as converting interlaced to progressive scan.
List of Bluetooth Smart gadgets currently available
So do you believe there is a use case for a document-oriented database? I feel like your comment writes off a huge swath of useful technology.

I said this below, but I'll say it again. Data is malleable, and writing apps to fit around any datastore seems wrong. I write applications to fulfill their use case. When the needs of the application change, so could it's database (or other dependencies).

http://gigaom.com/cloud/mongodb-or-mysql-why-not-both/
Yeah, fuzzing stream inputs is relatively straightforward. It's everything else that affects program outcome that's the issue. Trying to implement something like this via LD_PRELOAD manually is going to be a pretty enormous task.

Realistically, you'd have to automatically detect the calls made, for system calls you have ptrace (most commonly used by strace), though I'm not sure how you reroute them. I guess there must be some kernel-side hook. Still, that's likely to be too low-level for GUIs for example. Preloading dynamic libraries like that also only works well on ELF-based systems, other OSes behave rather differently, and if you're trying to test kernel code, it's a whole other problem.

Once you're simulating errors, you have to specify correct behaviour. For stream input fuzzing for security purposes, you're usually just probing for crashes. In the general case, the test framework will need to know the intended outcome of errors.

For either part, I'm not aware of anything existing like this. I'm slowly custom-building little islands of functionality like it, but it's a far cry from some kind of general solution.
Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface

Sounds a little like Oberon. I wonder how many people have used both.
> I am asked to always include my phone number and PIN in replies to Virgin.

That's probably the scariest part of all of this, although maybe not quite so much if there's a non-email way to contact them.
I'm curious as to whether you really believe more testing is the issue? Half the problems on that list are directly related to political/business decisions. Chrome's installer sucks because Google wants to make sure you can install it with non-admin rights. It breaks basic Windows guideilnes because.. fuck you that's why. Ask google. Their war to get Chrome on limited users desktops is a business decision. When you're asked to build a broken thing, more testing isn't going to fix it.

The other issues are easily addressed by stopping to cater to lazy users so much. Do we need yet another bloaty app to do basic things? Look at itunes. Its a monster. I'm not even sure how to get a CSV of contacts off an iphone. In the past this was trivial with any contact manager because the feature was baked in. Now that's a feature for "enterprise admins."

The remaining things on his list are the 'appification of everything.' Everything is now a shitty touch app that's incredibly dumbed down and buggy. Why try hard, especially when you userbase is locked down by 2 year carrier contracts? Or when all their music is trapped in an itunes database that can't be moved anywhere or given to anyone.

Apple won. This is "easy" and "just works." Big buggy apps with dumbed downed features designed to lock user data as deeply as possible. We've entered a new era of vendor lock-in. It the 1980s all over again. We need open protocols to work just enough for web and email. Everything else is up for grabs.

Get used to it, this is what the market has chosen. Meanwhile, I have to somehow train my users on how to use Windows 8's new tablet-based GUI on their standard PCs. This ain't progress. This is fashion.
It's funny you mention that. I just got through looking at ubermusic which is almost an exact clone of (or, if you prefer, heavily inspired by) the Zune software for Windows Phone.
In the cities (where this is true), that is a good thing. City streets are about efficiency of transport. A road that seems to go straight to your destination but then ends abruptly is not a good thing. Freeways are boring for the same reason. They're not meant to be exciting, they're meant to be roads.

Country roads in America are anything but boring, though. Some of them are bordering on downright dangerous with the twists, turns, and hills. I've never heard anyone argue that city streets were too efficient.
Orientation sensors allow the operating system to know how the subpixels are currently oriented and adjust the text rendering accordingly.
I'm curious how many Google services make automatic calls to plus.google.com for a variety of reasons.

As a former G+ user who was opted into SPYW without my consent, I tend to be skeptical of any announcements like this. Besides, why have they been so evasive of releasing numbers before?
The ActionBar is very consistent on these apps - of the first several dozen I only saw 2 that were not using an ActionBar.

Streaming has nothing to do with UI consistency. It's a battle, because the APIs are very high level and you're limited in the amount of control you have without a ton of work, and it seems like manufacturers are screwing with the stack somewhere. Doesn't matter, though, because we're talking about UI consistency.

The podcatcher app is sort of ripe for some good competition in this space, with Google Listen no longer available. I am working on something. http://imgur.com/RtG8e , but someone else should get in here too.
Why do I get the feeling that you're probably right about underpricing myself :)
Could it possibly be that they count users of Youtube/Google Drive and other Google products as "active" Google Plus users? Something must indeed be deceptive about these stats.
Design Your Life For Positive Black Swans
As to the easy to ignore, I can always defer or just remove the deadline (then it won't show up in the agenda); I'd rather capture and ignore than lose data. I don't get a lot of "big ideas", but I'm constantly thinking of little things that need looking after, and I will forget them if I don't record them somewhere. This even gets so bad that now I want something voice activated for when I am driving and think of something!

I've also tried scanning, to the tune of 10s of thousands of scans; then you have to manage the scans, and they aren't indexable by default (unless you have some fancy OCR type software like the Neat). It's one of the reasons I really prefer plain text: perfectly greppable, easy to slice and dice with Perl (or Python, Ruby, R, etc).
CS 1.3.1:

"Conditional assignment of previously undefined variables a or= b is now considered a syntax error."
Acoustic levitation is pretty unreal to watch
Disrupting Groupon, bringing people in without discounting products