skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Microsoft company store (the internal one) recently moved to a new location on campus. The new store is absolutely beautiful, but it carries a wide range of products that seem to only be interesting to Microsoft employees. Stuff like technical books, desk toys, t-shirts, etc. For sure, the best sellers are employee discounted software (including games) and hardware (including controllers, keyboards, etc). Zune also gets featured prominently.

I would expect a Microsoft store to sell a lot of partner's products. Building 3rd party ecosystems is kinda what Microsoft DOES. And they do it quite well. I expect to see the store luring people in with Xbox 360, but then convincing them to check out laptops from Dell, cell phones from HTC, and software from a wide variety of ISVs.
"So all the torture, repression, and extreme poverty during the Pinochet era was worth is huh?"

I never said that the oppression during Pinochet's term was right. What I said was that Chile's macro-economic policy was right. The economic growth under Chile was better than the inflation under Allende. Even critical things such as infancy mortality rate was a 4th under Pinochet as it was under Allende.

“And there HAS been socialist change since Pinochet. “

From WP:

The implemented economic model had three main objectives: economic liberalization, privatization of state owned companies, and stabilization of inflation. These market-oriented economic policies were continued and strengthened after Pinochet stepped down.[1] Successive governments have continued these policies for a quarter century.

Chile has the 8th highest economic freedom in the world – this shows that a lot of policies are still the same.
In other words, this is a plan to turn society from figuratively mortgaging our children's future literally mortgaging our children's future?
Or just take an ordinary attorney and TMS him...
I would like to go on the record as saying I think this is a great idea and that I expect the Microsoft stores to thrive.
If you force a `definition` of a term to explain every possible characteristic, nuances, and exceptions of the term, you are unlikely to come up with something meaningful and useful. When you make a statement in everyday conversations, it is generally assumed that the reader will be able to both extrapolate the definition to the meaning that is not originally covered by the definition. Likewise it is also assumed that the reader will also be able to intuitively exclude the exceptions.

When someone says It’s a crime to cut up people, it certainly doesn’t mean he holds the surgeons culpable.

Entrepreneur, in it’s most generally understood meaning, is about starting a business that actually makes money. The definition is specially relevant in the world of technology because it’s abound with businesses that created ‘cool’ products (because they were passionate about it) but failed to monetize it.

Now does that make 'social entrepreneur' a misnomer? Certainly not.
That's a reasonable sentiment, but only up to a point. What I read between the lines was, "You don't really understand the investment process yet, or where you need to be to begin looking for investment. Since you don't have any traction or a convincing team, you're not ready to be thinking about this."
If only all investors were this candid and polite.
Okay, well I'll admit it, I am surprised. There's a very big startup culture here - I've definitely heard more than one (qualified) person say that they aren't applying to companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and MSFT because they'd rather work at a startup. People throw the word impact around a lot. And during grad student orientation, they joked about the frequency with which PhD students leave the program to go start companies.

I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same because the CS departments are comparable.
6120 C Mic Microphone Problem
excellent point! What is a success to a smaller operator would be a failure for a much larger one.
I have found that out of approximately 500 users (talking face to face) you get 1-2 who actually DO know what they need, how it should look and act. We hired one and listened intently to the other.

It's a long search, but really, really worth it. I agree though - the coding is the simple part.
I don't really get these things... why code all night when you could just as easily code all day without entirely throwing off your biorhythms and feeling like crap the next day? It seems to me that I'd be a lot more productive when I didn't feel like burying my forehead in the desk (see 9:15 AM).
Google Ad Manager vs OpenX vs Trafficspaces
Microsoft: concrete prison cell with a wooden stool with splinters for you to sit on.

Apple: glass and steel prison cell with an Aeron chair for you to sit on.
You think customization is a waste of time? Ok, you want to get stuff done, thats reasonable. How about those of us who think that its the killer feater? I've been disassembling and tinkering with things since i was 4 years old. List of things i've broken while messing with them as a child: a turntable, 3 tape players, most of my toys. My favorite toy was duck tape and wires, because at 6 i still haven't learned to solder and that was the way i connected batteries to motors, lights switches(all taken from broken toys).

This is the type of person i am, so are a lot of HN users. Computers are like crack for us. Here is a machine that can do everything i imagine, no force can get me away from my pc, it is my playground. I've broken my Linux install countless times(before i started using linux, i did the same with Windows) i mess with everything, hell, im addicted to this.

Why does apple think we are some sort of barbarians with no taste? I get the feeling that they feel that if they give people more control, they will somehow shit all over their egos or something.

I mean, i don't want to shit on anybodies ego, but i want to play with stuff. I'm sure the other Steve understands.
sooner or later, China would have to bring trade back into equilibrium. The purpose of debt is to have it repaid one day. This can only be when Chinese are willing to pay for U.S. goods. This can be either when both countries enjoy some kind of parity.

This is not as far fetched as it sounds. The savings rate of Chinese Gen X'ers are 0. They are voracious consumers. If Chinese goverment decided to fund local debt instead of foreign debt, U.S. manufacturing could conceivably come back and sell into China in the future.
He's right you know. Especially if you consider how much easier it is becoming to accomplish the non-trivial in the latest programming languages like ruby, eventually, programming itself won't be a career anymore, it'll be an added-value skillset, and eventually, a common skill.

That's why I'm a reverse engineer and systems programmer. :D

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What's the usability benefit over simply having an iPhone friendly web UI?
And what's the connotation with "taxpayer money"?
Thanks, wasn't aware of this name.
Daily Routines: How interesting people organize their day.
Fink/ports work enough, but like I said it doesn't integrate with the OS like on Debian/Ubuntu. I've already mentioned the issue of clashing versions (gcc from Fink vs from Apple, etc.)

But OS X is nice, if only Ubuntu and Linux in general had the drivers, the overall polish, better menus (System Preferences on OS X are nice, on gnome they are a dog's breakfast) and dropped the ugly brown theme...

I think I'll stick to Mac laptops and Linux desktops and enjoy the best of both worlds :)
Meh.

It's a nice theory, but it's not particularly useful to someone who wants to start a business, or who is already starting a business. We make and test theories about the future in all our human endeavours - not just entrepreneurship. Even going on a date is testing a hypothesis about the future.

So, in summary, this article is correct about the human decision process, but incorrect in the implicit assumption that this is something specific to entrepreneurship.
Does anyone know of any major changes in this version?
Actually, what I find interesting is that I see an increasing number of websites make a non-free iPhone application of their site, while the site itself remains free. In the discussion whether or not many '2.0' (yeah, i know..) sites out there will ever be able to make a profit, it seems strange that a fair amount of said websites do not offer a non-free version of their sites as well. People obviously don't mind paying for something they see value in; and the iPhone app might prove that the site's readers actually see value in reading the site. Of course it might just be the "iPhone effect" that makes people get used to the fact that software can also have a price tag. Just had to think of this as I remembered a nice anecdote about a forum that started charging money to get rid of spammers and made quite some money as a 'side-effect' ;)
(I actually don't know reddit that well myself, so I don't know if they offer a paid option to see the websites without ads; so it's more a note about free websites in general)
Berkeley's hackathons are every six months, and given the way undergrads generally sleep, I don't feel like this is a huge deal.

That said, the main pros are probably the camaraderie and the challenge. The general case is people coding (long term projects) during the day and sleeping at night. Hackdays are different and fun! Plus there were prizes.
Thanks. The point I was trying to make was that developing a philosophy behind building a company is not generally considered a strong requirement for most web companies.

And if you develop a powerful enough theory for your market, and then build toward that theory rather than arbitrarily building a website with a function, you'll have a higher probably of eventual success.

I've seen a lot of companies just fail because there was real driving force behind the product more than "hey, that'd be cool, I think." That approach might work sometimes, but I think you can vastly improve your chances by having an underlying prediction for the market you're entering.
By sending them to die in foreign(for them and the US) wars? I'm reminded of the scene in Gangs of New York where Amsterdam is getting off the ship and the Army is there enlisting people right on the dock.

I think this kind of policy reeks of Imperialism.
To Craigslist and Google. (I'm so sorry. Fish... barrel...)
There's a link to release notes on the page, a few clicks in is probably what you're looking for:

http://www.debian.net/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch-w...
I think for some of those things, it is legal to do yourself, but not legal to provide a program which does it -- so basically nobody will know enough to do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2003-March...

Can someone comment on this?
Look, don't buy a computer based on what you think of the company. If you're serious about getting stuff done with your computer, get the best damn computer you can, regardless of company reputation

If MacBooks were made from the blood of infants... I don't get why you think this comment makes ethical sense in general. Maybe in this particular case, but not in general.
> In scientific research, an experimenter develops a hypothesis with a suspected theory and then builds an experiment to support the hypothesis.

This is a mis-charaterisation. Most likely the author knows, but scientists don't build experiments to support their theory or hypothesis. They use their theory to make a prediction, and then design an experiment to test that prediction. If the prediction is vindicated/validated by the experiment then the theory is supported.

Of course, this is the theoretical progress of science. In practice it's not as clean cut, but it's a good goal for our aspirations.

Having said that, I think it's an interesting article. Being specific about your model, being specific about your business theory, being specific about testing your model by performing experiments, and being specific about adapting your business model to take account of the results of said experiments, might be worth making explicit, rather than leaving implicit, haphazard, or even nonexistent.

If you want to make money, why not use (the theory of) science to help!
> Frankly I fail to see how this matters today or what kind of app he envisions where it could matter in the future.

> After all I cannot imagine a traffic pattern that would "flicker" at a second or even subsecond rate.

The app he's describing in the article: testing of his product. If done on 400 machines in parallel, it would take 2 min 36 sec, or 1.040 machine minutes. But he don't want to pay for 24.000 machine minutes, so he's opting for the the closer to one hour option, saving a lot of money, but failing at his objective: make the deployment (of which testing is a sub-process) as short as possible.
The Crying Game, Soylent Green, Requiem For A Dream, Misery
Some people disagree with that, but it's their prerogative as a company, and it's let Apple consistently create the best products in their respective markets with little debate. If that's evil, then I guess I'm evil, because I think they have the right and I wish more companies were that restrictive.

So think about that when you get your computer. Don't worry about all this bullshit arguing either way. Think about the computer itself.

It's interesting that you're willing to afford companies more freedoms and prerogatives than individuals. If this guy doesn't want to buy a computer because he disagrees with the way the company that makes it does business, that's his prerogative just as much as it's Apple's to attempt to control their products after they're outside of Apple controlled warehouses.

I fail to see how someone jailbreaking their phone keeps Apple from providing the closed off Steve Jobs' sanctioned user interface and experience to people who _don't_ jailbreak their phones.
My thought exactly .. where did the grid go? It was all the rage a few years ago.

Anyway, six minutes or not six minutes. An EC2 image, once shut down, is available to put back in production immediately, so I don't agree with Fitz' prediction that it'll take almost five years to get to 6 minutes intervals. As soon as Amazon realizes this usecase, why wouldn't they slash the billing interval? It would seem that our hours is chosen because it's easier to manage, and their initial use case was host of apps with peak periods - not one-off parallel tasks.
..and your sources are..? =)
Toshiba PA3420U-1BAC battery - TOSHIBA PA3420U-1BAC Laptop Battery 4400mAh Li-ion
There's a similar design pattern that I like better - rather than showing a sample of what a filled out page looks like, offer a short tutorial on what the expected actions are.

For example, 37signals does this well. After creating a Basecamp account, they embed short videos explaining new features on pages that you haven't used yet.
You can't underestimate the value of routine if you want to progress with the things you do. The more you do, the tighter your routine has to be. It's something I am constantly fighting with: trying to establish a routine and then stick to it. There are far too much distractions nowadays. It's almost like gathering information vs. applying that information and turning it into knowledge.
How complex is recharging one of these most modern batteries? In the old day(tm) it was simply a coase of overvoltaging by the right amount and leaving it for long enough. The circuits for recharging now seem much much more complex. Are they simply matching the overvoltage to the charging current, or is there more to it?

I do have ulterior motives in asking, of course. I'd welcome pointers to knowledgable and accurate answers on the web. Stuff I've found up to now seems either baseless or inaccurate.
Yes, They Could. So They Did.
you can sell it
The Death of "Web 2.0"
It is also usefull to backport and apply all those TTD, XP and Agile concepts.
Linux Version of Chrome To Use Gtk+
Gladwell says "Pepsi's", as in more than 1 Pepsi.
Nothing wrong with being a successful entrepreneur AND having passion.

But the point of the article is that founders of boo.com, webvan.com, kosmo.com etc. and all the other stupid 90's dotcom ideas all failed as entrepreneurs because their business sucked ... not because they lacked passion.

Passion + stupid business = passionately stupid business ailure.
Obama Snowballs a Cat
Hostage released for pizza
Nanostructures, Nanomaterials, and Lattice-Scaled Stiffness
I don't think the blogger is referring to unethical business practices any more than the blogger would endorse organised crime and steroids in sports. He is referring to people like Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin and Bill Gates .. not Bernie Madoff or Jeff Skilling.
The french origins come from the words for undertake and business (entreprise). Yes, so it means to star a business.
Installing Windows XP As A KVM Guest On Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop
this sporty hot-shot, who jumps on the roof every day / he knows how it works / but entirely missed the point. =)
Jimbo has tried many times to start businesses to make money, and he has failed in all of them.

It is one thing to start a nonprofit foundation and have people donated their time to building it.

It is a completely different thing to own a P&L, have to pay suppliers, pay employees, get customers, pay taxes, and still make money.

Jimbo is many things, but he is NOT a successful entrepreneur. Wikia anyone?
With a title like this it's impossible to know whether the article is interesting to me...
Which also brings up the fact that browsing HN raises my awareness of my ignorance... across the broad range of Hacking topics that impact my work: topics that I don't know I need educating about until I read about others struggles and revelations. [My own weak coding practices won't expose to me their weakness -- except through expensive errors.]
So Thomas Friedman participates in a cross-India solar-car rally/protest/demo?

Not particularly Hacker-Newsworthy. But that's where the value of comes in... if someone posts an abstract (even if not voting the article up).
All startups trying to play the "Charge nothing, grow ginormous, then monetize with ads" game should read the above comment and then ponder "Now, what company would really, really like to pay me to show their advertisements to this chap?"
Rather a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481439 ... which is now dead.

Being a techcrunch post doesn't make the issue any less of a straw man / link-bait.
Official Google are usually hosted on "blogspot.com" (googleblog.blogspot.com).
Better Open Source Code Just With Volunteers?
The French have done this for years via the Foreign Legion. We Brits do it to a more limited extent with the Gurkhas and the Commonwealth nations. Russia offers citizenship to recruits from the former Soviet Empire. Frankly I am surprised it took the US, a nation built on immigration, so long to come up with this.
Debian is 1/2 of my Linux power combo. Debian servers, Ubuntu desktops. Love it.

Unlike Ubuntu, Debian's release cycle is so sporadic (and long) that I often forget they're working on a new release. Needless to say I was surprised and excited by this announcement. Props to the Debian team!
Yes, you may come across a cool idiom to use in your code by procrastinating and reading blogs. You may also come across a cool idiom by coding, looking at your code and thinking: how could I do this better; share your code with someone you could learn from, or read a book or two on your language of choice.

Don't make excuses for your procrastination. Accept that procrastination is sometimes just a fun alternative to what you need to get done. Luckily, the end of the article shies away from the bombastic title.
Certainly it is faster to develop a program in Ruby than the equivalent program in 86 asm. On the other hand it is still the same mind that is needed to produce the results (at least for anything that is not trivial).
Nations wrestle with mounting job losses
Adam Smith UNDERSTOOD what Wall Street Hasn't... The Purpose of Individual Initiative
Do Androids Dream of Apple-Blackberry Crumble?
Each of these people finds a form of structure that works for them. The trick is to get the benefit of discipline without giving up any creativity.
The idea behind this is not immigration but empire. The countries you mention have or still do identify with the latter, the US less so.
I haven't read any of Fleming's adult fare. But his fudge recipe in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is fabulous. Read Chitty. Make fudge. Yum. And I dare you to spill boiling chocolate on a Kindle!
You are probably joking, but I will repeat anyway: I asked about usability benefits.
Congratulations to the Debian Community.

I used to have the same combo but finally switched my desktops to Lenny.

Lenny feels lighter than Ubuntu and it has been interesting to learn how to tweak it to make it as pleasant as Ubuntu.
"thwomp"? The Rockets are a good team but haven't won a championship and haven't been that competitive in the playoffs.

The "moneyball" idea doesn't translate quite as well in basketball. One, it's a significantly less statistical game than baseball. Athleticism doesn't translate perfectly to numbers and individual stats can be largely effected by teammates.
"Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 hours on a sustained basis, but it's hard. You have to get down to eating once a day and showering every other day, things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours."

- Len Bosack, co-founder, Cisco Systems, and hero to the hardcore
Microsoft Posts $250,000 Reward for PC Hackers
Thanks for the warning about Ludlum. The sad fact is, Dan Brown's junk is better than a lot of other stuff I borrow from the "New" rack at the library. At least Brown I can laugh at. Bad is bad, but laughably bad is better.
Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'
Iowa student engineers develop hand-held water sanitizer for a thirsty world
...other things? But these are nerds you're talkin' bout, remember? ;P
I wouldn't try that if I were you. These beasts can produce fields up to two tesla BTW

Handled unproperly they can trigger epileptic seizure.

Furthermore, the effect depends on the brain area you target and the frequency of the stimulus. If you can't aim precisely, you won't get the expected results. For precise aiming, you need to coregister your stimulator with an MRI of your brain.
~350 founders x $5,000/founder = ~$1.75 million invested, so far.

Was there something incorrect, or otherwise objectionable, about this comment?
Timely line from CS Lewis "And it is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock."

He could never have imagined the black tide of corporate email that washes up on my desk everyday.
Its a she.
Microsoft used to have a store in San Francisco -- in the Metreon Mall. They carried a lot Microsoft-logo-covered scwhag -- the kind of stuff they give away at conferences -- mistakingly thinking that people would want to buy that stuff for their home.

One disadvantage, from a retail perspective, is that there's no way to make a a table full of computers from different vendors look beautiful. No matter what you do, it will end-up looking like a mishmash of mostly ugly plastic machines.

They should definitely follow in Apple's footsteps and give people free access to the Internet -- that will, at a minimum, fill the store with people and give the illusion that people are buying stuff. I think that worked to Apple's advantage.
oh, I wasnt - just misread.

iPhone apps have better integration with OS -- eg GPS/Camera. Also lets you use the Gyro to rotate display.

Same UI elements, for the most part though
The syntax in Haskell is very easy, in fact there is much less of it than in Ruby.
How Patent Trolls Are A Tax On Innovation
little offtopic, https plz:

https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcfqz3h7_226gbbhd7dx
You don't need syntax for that. Regular function application has the highest precedence and functions always have exactly one argument.
Shame on me, seems I skimmed that text way too briefly.
Yes, now it makes sense.