skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think both reviews are perfectly objective, but I don't think The Verge one is very good. There is all of 2 paragraph dedicated to the features of Windows 8 that make it unique (mostly just listing those features), and he only points out the charms bar as something he likes. No discussion of tiles (either the concept of tiles, or "live tiles" specifically). 2 sentences about side-by-side apps. It's ok if the reviewer didn't like these features; but the review should have said such, and specified why.

I don't think the review is intentionally biased, I just think it is biased towards the status quo. Instead of reviewing the Surface for what it is and letting the chips fall where they may, he reviewed the Surface based on the features it has common with other tablets, with the question being "how does the Surface compare to the best parts of the iPad and Nexus 7". From that perspective I think the review is fair, but I also think he's reviewing about 60% of what the device can do.
Learning from Apple: Determining the Right Metrics for Your Business
Actually I find a touch screen much faster for most things. Has the author tried it enough?

No, increase your mouse sensitivity I can't physically move my hand as fast as I move the mouse because the full screen is only 1 inch travel distance on my mouse. Most of this is from playing games but high DPI mice on a good surface are vary precise.
The first revision of the XT (.5TB) was a dog and barely worth the effort. The new version is significantly improved.
My SaaS app was priced exactly 5$/month previously. It had a decent conversion rate, a handful of users, lots of support requests, and a bit of revenue.

Meanwhile I've increased the prices, the cheapest plan is now 29$/month. Guess what? Conversion rate didn't change, thus I gained new users at the new price point (I of course grandfathered old users), and of course the revenue increased almost by a factor of six. What's also interesting is that I get way less support requests from the people who pay more, thus the six-fold increase of the monthly price resulted in more than six times profit (profit = 6 * old_revenue - 3 * old_support_request_rate)
Researchers discover evidence of premonition
Facebook Stock Is Soaring It's Up 24%
Argument subverted. "PCs are no longer a growing market, and the PC market will begin to shrink" != "PCs are dead." Ya, home PCs are not being replaced as much anymore because we are using our iPads more on the couch or in bed, so maybe I can replace that laptop every 4 years instead of every 2, and when was the last time anyone turned on that desktop. And at work...they seem to be replacing PCs left often also, so the PC market is definitely going through some big "adjustments."

I'm completely computer literate and use my iPad exclusively when at home; I have stacks of laptops that don't get any use anymore. Its just more convenient to use for what I do at home, I will not be replacing my home PCs for a very very long time. And...kids today will grow up using mostly iPads and facebook, they won't experience the joys of a BASIC command prompt like we did. Given the proliferation of canned content, they are unlikely to get their hands really dirty with flexible/configurable computing until they reach college!
What native applications are there for Windows on ARM?
No, it doesn't. You are inserting that implication so that you can poison-the-well on like-opinions later.
I wonder if we'll end up joining OPEC? Could there actually be advantages in that?
Job cuts announced at Zynga
YouTube - Will Allow Offsite Linking Through Video Annotations
Asahi Associates - BlackBerry Sales Boost RIM.
We'll see how many apps actually work well though, and which ones have to be tweaked. Not every developer follows the standards.

It's not like Apple even does either. The recent iOS 6 apps store on iPhone is a good example of something where they made the tap targets too small to expand app updates and it was very frustrating. They finally fixed that just recently so that the target was much larger.
I don't think that's what Microsoft are aiming for here - MS Office and a usable separate keyboard doesn't say play to me.
Spooky Scary PHP
I'm curious how much of the OpenGL stack lives on the GPU. Does anyone know how low- or high-level the interface to the Videocore is? (Yes, I could just dive into the official source code release and the unofficial reverse engineering project, but that would be an inefficient use of potentially hours, when someone in the know might be able to answer in minutes)
Why venture capitalists shouldn’t try to solve health care
I had the exact same experience, but I was paying for their VPS service. I believe it was over $30/month, and it went down all the time with very little traffic. Dreamhost is a tempting host for a new site because it's so easy to set up, but I think you save time and headaches in the long run starting with someone else.
Let's crowdsource a mobile app for Seth Godin
PIN pads hacked at 63 Barnes & Noble stores
If I understand correctly, this 'aquaponics' solution:

* does not require arable land, because the plants grow on containers filled with stones through which water constantly circulates;

* uses an order of magnitude less water than traditional agriculture, because the water is constantly recycled back from a nearby fish tank, and because the rock layer prevents water from evaporating;

* allows plant density (i.e., number of plants per unit of area) an order of magnitude greater than traditional agriculture, because plant roots don't have to work as hard to find nutrients, so they grow straight down;

* does not attract traditional bug pests or weeds, because there is no wet soil to attract them;

* makes plants grow much faster, because they're getting a constant supply of nutrients fed through the water recycling system; and

* is also an inexpensive fish-farming solution!

Unless I'm missing something big, this solution looks BRILLIANT to me. All it needs now is for a talented entrepreneur to come in, find an early-adopter market for it, and turn the technology into a standardized product that can be sold at scale.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drzacharyharris

Wow, the guy's a monster.
Fluent in classical (and Levantine) Arabic, Chinese, Greek; Top Putnam score (twice), teacher, Christian missionary. Sounds like he's got drive.
On some level, Dropbox is a hardware company [1]. I think that once you have installed software at a clients location, you are in a different realm than simply being a cloud/software/service provider. The customer has full ownership of the device. I think that the move to hardware is tri-fold (a) hardware is easier now than ever (b) hardware is a good strategy and a natural barrier to entry for a startup (in general, less people grok hardware and systems software than they do web programming[2]) (c) a small/mini subconscious push-back against the Cloud[3] where more and more customers are being turned off by not owning something at the end of the day[4]

[1] The hardware is the customers PC.

[2] iOS device programming, w/ human interaction (gyroscope) has also been a natural training ground.

[3] Of course, many Hardware companies these days Square, Dropbox, etc, will be paired with a cloud service.

[4] Acqui-hires..."We are shutting Down. Please Download your stuff by next week. Thanks for being a User and getting me interest from a big fish, see you on my next startup"
These posts contribute to the decline of HN. If you're here to get on the front page or to sell something you're here for the wrong reason and you should do us all a favor and find your pageviews somewhere else.
>"tax avoidance and political lobbying"

So with his vast fortune Gates ensures that he pays the minimum required in taxes (which may support policies he disagrees with), and instead spends money on policies he supports.

That sounds perfectly rational.
I am ignoring your advice due to your grammatical mistake.
Are you on Dreamhost VPS or plain-old shared hosting?

I had to migrate my WordPress off Dreamhost shared hosting as it was too slow and blowing their CPU limits. That was around 2006 and I'm sure a lot has changed.
And they didn't tell anything about what apple did to make it fast. About this for instance

Betty:~ lelf$ dig www.apple.com

[…]

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.apple.com.	1434	IN	CNAME	www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net.
www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net. 21 IN	CNAME	www.apple.com.edgekey.net.
www.apple.com.edgekey.net. 21234 IN	CNAME	e3191.c.akamaiedge.net.
e3191.c.akamaiedge.net.	20	IN	A	23.32.109.15

[…]

(If you really don't understand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network)

EDIT: formatting, links
Windows RT doesn't have desktop apps, they'll only be supported in Windows 8 on x86/64 processors. ARM tablets like this version of Surface are Metro only.
Even the supply is getting better. They have been increasing the production rates and the delivery timings are getting shorter.
Steve Jobs would never have written this post
They've tried. A lot. Newsflash: iOS is a touch-only OS born and bred, and trying to control it with a keyboard makes about as much sense as strapping tits on a bull. Sure, you can type away in an isolated text box and it's sorta alright, but beyond that you're looking at a severely hobbled experience - because that's what you get when you just inflate your apps 'n icons phone OS and toss a keyboard into the mix. Whereas Microsoft has developed their OS from the ground up to mix between different input styles and it shows.

Microsoft is simply leagues beyond Apple when it comes to really optimising for productivity. They -get- productivity - Apple doesn't.
Desandro (Twitter Web Designer & inventor of Isotope) talks creation and making
Dear benologist, you must be new around here. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In particular, the gist of your post is better expressed by flagging OP.

[edit]
On a related note, a post ``how others are gaming HN ranking algorithm to get more pageviews'' would indeed be relevant.
good source.
Not really. Samsung is lowering deliveries to Apple, instead allocating the capacity to themselves (and Amazon, not for HD displays though).
+1 for Page.ly. We had a slightly awkward setup (for a multisite blog) but their support was excellent.
Trekking the Grand Canyon for Google Maps
its upto you...
The algorithm of using to-do lists
They were also written in assembly and had their audio encoded in a midi-like format, so they're designed from the ground up to fit in tiny storage.
My ability to flag articles got taken away after I used it too much.
How a Google Headhunter’s E-Mail Unraveled a Massive Net Security Hole
What toxicity issues exist with hydroponics? I know nothing about growing plants.
what it this?? some one make spam here.
Single page, for those who prefer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-...
LOL as someone using a Lenovo, right now, let me just say this:

If you buy it over an Apple, you get what you deserve. The quality from Lenovo has been declining since they bought the brand from IBM. Thinkpad's are a SHADOW of their former glory, sadly.

Here's something people don't factor in when buying laptops: Your expensive MacBook Pro is having issues? Well, visit an Apple store and get it fixed!

Your expensive Lenovo is having issues? Well... mail it back...

But you still didn't make the comparison, you told other people to do it. Until you make the comparison, I'm still betting that the Lenovo cuts corners in a variety of ways to make the product cheaper, and as a consumer you have to accept those cost-cutting trade offs.
I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.
Full article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/dkim-vulnerability-...
>"I call bullshit on that as well. People like that do not get the type of funding that Zynga got."

I think we should measure the executives "fitness" based on the fact that the stock is below book value less than one year after the IPO, rather than the fact that they managed to attract some cool people to the board.
Square Now Available in Canada
Against Toilets - how "Squatting" can combat Hemmorhoids
I never thought of HN as a medium to promote anything but in any case I found the analysis very interesting.
Cool, reminds me of another great WebGL globe demo: http://superfad.com/missioncontrol/traffic/
> Harris thought there was no way Google would be so careless, so he concluded it must be a sly recruiting test to see if job applicants would spot the vulnerability. Perhaps the recruiter was in on the game; or perhaps it was set up by Google’s tech team behind the scenes, with recruiters as unwitting accomplices.

Ha! That's optimistic.
Great post, Zach. I couldn't agree more. I even had the same thoughts yesterday, when a few of those types of posts popped up on HN. And I completely agree, although yes Steve had that old interview where he hated the idea of this middle sized iPad, I think at some point he would have had to make something like this to cave in to the market demand. And sort of like you mentioned, products like this are not made overnight. I would not be surprised if the early talk of the iPad Mini was when Steve Jobs was alive. I'm not sure if anyone can really publicly confirm or deny that.
I assume 8:35am ET on Monday is the best time to submit, based on when this was submitted. No need to read the article ;-)
>"You know you have a problem when you are on the wrong side of the 80 /20 rule, as an entire field."

Or, you can not care that these athletes are using science to perform optimally at their sport. That's what I do, but that's another argument.
Dan Buettner also held a presentation at TED in 2009 called "How to live to be 100+":

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100....
Square to launch in Canada
More bandwidth is not the answer for webpages...

The overhead of TCP and HTTP make latency the limiting factor - see Mike Belshe's "More Bandwidth doesn't Matter (Much)" - http://www.belshe.com/2010/05/24/more-bandwidth-doesnt-matte...
EXT4 Data Corruption Bug Hits Stable Linux Kernels
My gut reaction was the same, I'm more interested in the technical solutions the experts have come up with. The cloud idea is interesting, but I've already got git and vim everywhere so it's not a radical idea for me. I wish he had gone into more detail regarding acme, I bet that would be fascinating.
Funny, my Linux install definitely runs legacy Win32 apps.
What about the paid plan?
The way you explain it means two things. First the investment needed to built the necessary production capacity, but that is not production cost (production cost are a result of this via hourly rates and costs per piece). The ability to cale from a prototype stage to serial production is crucial here, and yes damn expensive and risky. One wrong step and the company doesn't even have to care about inventories.

Inventory kicks in once the company has scaled successfuly. And then iventories are more curial to success than production costs in terms of company survival. Market entry is won with product costs low enough to make a profit. Once in the market you live and die by cash expanses, inventories are huge part of this. Espacially since hardware becomes outdated pretty fast, high levels of exess stock can basically mean death for a young company.

But all that is one of the schleps coming with hardware, and bulding such an operation from scratch is a really interesting thing to do.
From what I can see in the referenced talk, Samsung will still only provide binaries for the graphics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyYXh1V8ov8#t=30m40s
DKIM is an anti-spam mechanism. It does not authenticate the sender of an email message; to do that, use something like PGP. This is an interesting story, but it's not a story about a "massive net security hole". Mail on the Internet has always been spoofable.
The Birth of a Handmade Tool
Deep in the Latvian hinterland tools are still being made the traditional way.
Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project
You get a little more storage space, a little bit of CSS control, but you still can't bring your own themes and plugins, edit the code, etc. Plus, there's no way to migrate a multi-gigabyte blog network's data over, AFAIK.

WordPress.com is an SaaS for blogging like Tumblr or Posterous. It happens to be built on a custom, locked down install of the WordPress multi-site software. It's not a website hosting company.
Conference Keeps Growing & Growing Nearly 700 Attendees, 95 Startups
> I'm no fan of NLP - it was intended as a personal
> development aid to deal with phobias and disorders, so was
> intended to be internally-focused. However, in my experience,
> many use it as a manipulative tool (externally-focused),
> which I dislike intensely.

That's not a problem of the tool itself, but a problem with the handlers of the tool.

Usually people learn NPL to fix weird behavior within themselves. Once that happens, they usually ignore the meme "with great power comes great responsibility", and go their way messing with other people's ideas, or even feelings.

If you learn it as it was intended, and refrain yourself of exploiting it for profit, you're on the good side.

I always wanted to learn NPL, but I've never tried because I figured I wasn't ready yet. But after this, I think the time might be perfect to pick it up and weed out some weird behaviors of my own.
Wow, that's huge. Can't wait to get hacking on processing and openframeworks. Being able to do real accelerated computer vision stuff with the Pi will be slick.
The Whole Room Will Be the Computer
As a muslim, I don't think this belongs here.
The CoffeeScript gem is included by default in new rails installs, and some js.coffee files are created, so you'd have to explicitly remove it - most people won't bother even if they are writing most of their js without it. The following gems are included by default, which perhaps makes the usage in these apps (done in a hurry) not very surprising:

gem 'sass-rails'
gem 'coffee-rails'
gem 'jquery-rails'
100%. If any old jackass could say with any accuracy what Steve Jobs would or wouldn't do, then there wouldn't have been much magic to being Steve Jobs, would there?
In Germany on the other hand...

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=qype%2C%20yelp&ge...
I've had the opposite experience of WP Engine, and appreciate leaving caching and performance issues to somebody else, given that my company has a somewhat limited staff for supporting servers and CMS upgrades. I am building a semi-complex Multisite installation with multiple domains. So far, it's been pretty decent.

Your frustration with their caching "secret sauce" is understandable. However, you can get a rough idea of their caching back-end by poking around in the WP Engine config files and plugins bundled with your installation. They also provide a nice little overview here: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/.

If you are staging out anything more complex than a single blog, you will definitely want to have two production instances to test on. For some, this is a raw deal. I personally don't mind.

I am also not a huge fan of their CDN feature, which works by rewriting URLs in your page source to point files and assets to NetDNA servers. However, I am hopeful that they will improve upon it.

That said, I have enjoyed a platform that keeps my Wordpress installations secure with automatic upgrades.

Comparing WPEngine to other hosting providers like Linode or Dreamhost is really unfair. They offer completely different services, and specialize in Wordpress-optimized hosting only.

I also have to say that it was really nice to not be part of Amazon/Heroku's outage this week. WP Engine has a control panel hosted on Heroku, but all their sites live in the Linode network, evading downtime.
“A 384-bit key I can factor on my laptop in 24 hours,” he says. “The 512-bit keys I can factor in about 72 hours using Amazon Web Services for $75. And I did do a number of those. Then there are the 768-bit keys. Those are not factorable by a normal person like me with my resources alone. But the government of Iran probably could, or a large group with sufficient computing resources could pull it off.”

"But the government of Iran probably could"...At this point I stopped reading, as this article became propaganda.

Did you know this month is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, as advertized by the DHS?

http://www.dhs.gov/national-cyber-security-awareness-month
The GL calls are marshalled across to the VideoCore firmware. The VideoCore firmware has essentially a function for each GL entry point. The shader compiler is in the VideoCore firmware. The QPU code fragments are generated by a pull on a data flow representation in the firmware.
FSFE interview with Terms of 'Service: Didn't Read' founder Hugo Roy
Hugo's project "Terms of Service: Didn't Read" has recently won international attention in publications such as TIME, Le Monde, and ZEIT, in it's campaign to simplify the legal terms of web services. He is FSFE’s French Team coordinator, co-founder of the Digital Freedoms association, and in 2009 did extensive work on the impact of Europe's Interoperability Framework (EIF) on Free Software users.
Really interesting to see this here on my first morning after beginning my segmented sleep experiment. I took a quarter pill of melatonin yesterday around 6pm and slept from 6:30 till 8:30, then quickly fell asleep again till 11:30. I then failed to fall asleep at 2:30am after a wonderful mellow productive night programming session, and had to skip the second sleep.

During the morning I found, completely by chance, some articles on a fasting diet from the mark's daily apple blog. And I had been without eating since first falling asleep (and still am), so I eagerly gobbled it up as validation on all those breakfasts I have skipped.

And finally I talked with my roomate about living long as related to these little body hacking experiments.
Yes, exactly. Maybe I should edit the article to include this, it's an important aspect. Sure, the person might be hypocritical, but this doesn't invalidate the argument.
HN is turning into an entrepreneurship / self-help subreddit. The variance of the types of articles that reach the front pages has been dropping significantly IMHO. And I can't see any simple mechanism for restoring it, either.
Not following one's own performance advice isn't hypocrisy. Performance might just not matter as much to Zoompf.
The 25 Most Popular Passwords of 2012
Anyone have experience with ZippyKid? How are they?
That's a shame. It's something at least...

Binary drivers or binary GPU firmware? If the latter then Pi is in much the same place. (I would watch the video but am at work...)
Depends on the threshold for calling something "serious". It's far more serious than any alternative before WebM, that's for sure. No competing format will ever be an instant drop in replacement for an entrenched format, but there is a continuum of scenarios below that.
Surely Rob Pike could get funding to start a hardware company, especially if the aim is going to be low powered devices connecting to cloud services?
On second read I think he might mean that because of the carppy form factor it's not correct to call this a tablet; that it only really works with the keyboard installed while resting on a desk - eg in pc mode.
VPS. http://sachagreif.com runs on it and got to the top 5 of HN many times without any trouble (I'm using W3 Total Cache).

The only reason I'm thinking about switching away is that their control panel is a little messy, and they don't support Git deployment out of the box (although you can activate it via ssh, which is what I did).

It also feels faster than PHPFog for some reason, especially the WordPress admin. So overall, I'd say they're a pretty good option for budget hosting.
Worst password of 2012, Have you ever used one of these?