skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me it's simply a matter of perspective. Personally, while I haven't used a Surface, I already know my opinions will fall precisely in line with Marco's. No one is right or wrong in this argument, all that matters in the end is which side has the majority that is most willing to fork over the cash.

I can almost see the executives at the last company I worked for salivating over the Surface. Many, many people will always see Apple products as superficially limiting and excessively expensive (even when the PC alternative costs more). My liberal-minded art student friends? They've already got iPads.

I think the dichotomy Neil Stephenson outlines in In the Beginning was the Command Line[1] is as true today as it ever was. Apple is Pepsi to MS's Coke, Obama to MS's Romney. Technology consumers fall into very distinct categories, and while Marco obviously falls into one of those, I think he does a good job of highlighting the difference in thought. This is why Microsoft exists and will continue to exist as long as Apple does. They are the anti-Apple.

[1] http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
According to studies not performed by a company selling test prep, there is no large leap in SAT score.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html
Are there like "icing printers" now or is that done by hand?
Guess you will never know (read: closed source) ;)
Oh, yes, how could I forget Opera, cross platform, cross architecture, mobile and PCs. Perhaps it is hard to get cakes to Oslo?
My thoughts were exactly the same. In mere 8 hours yesterday they went up by more than $100k. Is there any sorts of stats on Kickstarter to see which sizes of pledges were contributed during a given period of time? Seems a little dodgy to me - could they actually fund the rest of the campaign out of their own pocket(they have a 2.5M investement after all)? But anyway I already pledged $120 myself to get the board, they guys seem trustworthy.

Update: The links below reveal services for tracking campaign so I will investigate: http://www.kicktraq.com/ and http://canhekick.it/project/5064d31d8f647c24e5ad60d0

Update2: So they raised $192k yesterday, October 26 with 903 backers which averages to $212 per pledge. So it is all looks fine, perhaps that's how campaigns generally behave.
Thanks it worked.
I get the impression that his whole experience of the Surface was tainted by Microsoft's ham-fisted attempts at retail culture. The Surface sounds like a cool product with a lot of potential but from everything I've heard about Microsoftle Stores I can't blame him for not being in the mood. As he described it they're overflowing with weird forced enthusiasm... like the ugly girl at the party who's having SO MUCH FUN and and wants to talk to everyone about how fun this party is!
Please, they're not trolling anyone, they're just embarassing themselves. Even if they can sell a bundle of Surfaces it's not worth it.
Actually, it always seems to come down to EBS failure, which is an "old" feature.
Metro Bootstrap
I don't use GAE, but in the comments at the original article there were people talking about huge amounts of instances getting spun up.

Does the 10% cover that in all cases? (Did they maybe roll-back any charges from those 6 hours, as well?)
Harder schools don't necessarily have harder grading. I taught at both Rutgers and NYU - if anything, Rutgers was tougher than NYU.

At Rutgers we failed people regularly. At NYU this would raise red flags and generate huge numbers of complaints (from students and parents).
How to work with Hibernate Query Language
Wait a second - the system is known to be corrupt and political. Therefore, we should reduce external accountability and give more control to the corrupt political actors?
Haha. I'd love someone to release a greasemonkey/userscript for that status page to make degraded service more obvious.
Redbeet juice as a remedy for a low blood pressure
Generic Viagra Industry Is Pro-Choice In Payments
For an article which seemed to jump about so much, I found this unusually readable. I think it's because each paragraph has at least one "nugget". e.g.

> As late as the mid-1800s, an English gentleman was expected to beat
> a boorish cabman or bargee for an affront we would now consider trivial.

This is a style of writing which instead of drawing facts and anecdotes to support a thesis rather draws a thesis to sew together facts and anecdotes - in this case the "American castle" theme. This is Malcolm Gladwell done short and sweet.
hi jejones3141, I sincerely regret the inconvenience. That i think is the case when you try to use it over https. You can also access it here http://appsaber.com/fastword/
I think the whole thing is magic now. That here in my bedroom, this box can link me 135 years into the past just strikes me as incredible.
Hi Nedwin, Yes actually. It had been quite some time since i created any FB app and since the api changes frequently i wanted to re acclimatize myself. And i find building something to be a better approach to learning.
Stupid idiot answers all.

Volume should always be controlled as close to the source as possible. Anything else is simply inefficient and a waste of processing power.

There is no reduction of bit depth. total hoo-eee.
I don't see how that distinction is useful.
I think Simon Peyton Jones says it best about Haskell :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ

He says Haskell is useless. Without even debating that (it can certainly be useful for certain classes of programming problems), you can see his point : The goal of Haskell was to start from an ideal view (pure functional programming without side effects) and try and see how to make that eventually practical for everyday programming, without sacrificing the pure core of the language.

You have languages, like F# (or even C# !) that takes lessons from Haskell, with at the same time being practical for pretty much every programming task (their platform , .Net, makes them useless for a lot of use cases, but that is another problem)

And on the other side (in my opinion), you have languages like Go, being pretty dismissive about pretty much everything learned from languages like Haskell.

I respect the point of view of Go's creator, i just disagree with it, and don't see any project i could do in Go that i wouldn't prefer doing in Scala/OCaml/C#. But more power to people who want to do great things in Go !

Go fills a niche (AOT compiled without a VM) that only OCaml fills in the list of languages i have listed, and OCaml is probably much more complicated to learn, even if it is way simpler than Haskell, so even if i don't agree with the design choices, i can see why Go could gain traction (apart from the fact that it is Google powered)
Rapportive for HN and Twitter Chrome extension
Interesting article (if not really Hacker news material, I think). It is made even better by the (currently) last comment (the one with Lamech), make sure you read it, too.
I think it's fair to point out that the Surface and Windows 8 are both v1, and that Microsoft will clearly work on improving them rapidly. They have a lot of rough spots now but the situation could be very different in two or three years. This doesn't mean that you should ignore either product's current problems of course. The iPhone wasn't perfect when it came out either.
You pledged just to see the project succeed ?
doh, a 100-year misunderstanding of today's people created by Apple's marketing material.
Microsoft might have a lot of good ideas, but they're wasted if they can't execute them as well as Apple. No amount of apologising can force the buying public to favour Microsoft.
Ask HN: Is an extended validation (EV) SSL cert worth it?
Our site's SSL is fine - it's a cert of the garden variety that does the basics. I've been reading a bit more about the extended validation certificates and wondering: are they worth the extra cash for a retail commerce site? I'd love to hear from people with experience in working with sites that have the EV certs to see whether you noticed a conversion rate difference.

Thanks!
Working with different functions in Hibernate Query Language
> In the case of the developers of Go, we are talking about people who I believe to be smarter than the vast majority of programming language researchers

Why would you have such an opinion ? I can turn the problem in my head a thousand times, i still can't see why. Because it is from the makers of Unix ?

The only way i could make sense of your statement is by saying people who makes the most used technology are the most clever, intrinsically. But i think this is an incredibly naive point of view.

I can see a bunch of things that make Go susceptible to have success : Traction, from the name of it's inventors and main sponsor (Google). Simple philosophy that makes it easy to learn, and pragmatic orientation. It doesn't mean it's a better language in any way. Just that it's aiming for the path of least resistance.

It is a respectable goal. Now i don't see the logic in saying that PL researchers are not as smart because they have more idealistic goals.
The article is over two years old and looking at the source it seems like the site he was working on (http://www.papsonline.org/) is still Drupal. Would be interesting to know the background story is there.
This article is two-and-a-half years old. Even if it were true at the time, things have moved on an awful lot since then.
I think people have different definitions of blog spam and it's a matter of taste. Personally I began to grind my teeth after the first cliche-ridden paragraph ("cliche-ridden" again being subjective, but the "there should be a Nobel Prize for..." format has been done enough now that it just seems lazy to me) and by the time I got to "the Button 2.0 is approximately a thousand times more useful" (emphasis mine, to highlight particularly clunky hyperbole) I was hovering over the tab with my finger over middle-click.

Here's the thing: this kind of overwritten article is so easy to put together and IMO so inferior to the clean, straight-up no-nonsense page on the Shapeways site that I don't feel "blog spam" is so inaccurate. I don't feel strongly enough to call it out as such as "benologist" did, especially as I know that to others on here (such as yourself?) it's not, but I hope this explanation helps you see it from both sides. To "benologist" this sincerely is blog spam and the fact that they linked to the cleaner article gets them an upvote from me.
A difference between US accelerators and European ones (video)
Thanks, I am also tired of this conflation of valid criticism with "bias."
It gave me warm fuzzy feelings to see two members of the IE team with Firefox sweaters ! That's what you can call healthy competition i guess.
So does this alleged "bias" invalidate his criticisms of Microsoft's retail efforts?
The icing is done by hand. You can buy stencils for the lettering.

I guess an SVG of the logo can be used as a template to cut out paste.

But you raise a good idea: 3d printing of sugar "stuff" to print messages for cakes on demand, in any font.

Printed edible sheets to put on cakes already exist.
Give it a break. That article is 2.6 years old. Some of the points might still be valid, but there is a solution (and probably was at the time of writing as well) to every and each of the problem mentioned there.

Regarding the quality of reusable apps, well, it's like with all other software libraries out there. Some of the apps are really invaluable (mostly the utility ones addressing things like API creation, database extensions, forms or debugging), some of them address very specific problems and some of them should't ever see the daylight. Nothing new.
He walked into a store and hated it. For any company that cares about success he is credible.
Using Sharepoint Designer - Introduction to MS SharePoint with .Net - Part 16
What are you trying to imply? That criticisms of Microsoft's retail efforts are no longer valid because Apple made a mistake with Maps?
The article is old but i'd like to answer some points in the comments :

> I originally started a project of mine in Django only to find out that the ORM couldn’t handle the types of queries that I needed to perform.

I dont believe that , since you can do your own queries with Django , even in RAW sql.

> Not only that, but the ORM in Django forces it’s own database conventions on developers.

That's not true , you can use an old database that has nothing to do with django and still get a full integration with the ORM.

Django is not a CMS with plugins. It is a mvc framework that helps you begin really fast. While there are a few things that seems to make customisation a bit difficult, (auth with email instead of username ), there is always a simple solution to every problem if one digs a bit , but it requieres to understand how the framework works , like any other framework.
Sass port of YAML
For those wondering whats the difference between the Parallella and the Rasberry PI:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/99-ras...
Www.cosmeticanaturaletnika.com
The root of the word chivalry is telling. We portray history in fairy tale manner, as if the old days were better, and consequently it is awkward to feel anger. What about the progress we have made in spite of our naturally selected for violence? Evolutionarily, except in niche cases, pacifist gene lines were subjected to negative selection pressure. We unfortunately have some wiring that is not up to code.
Self-Esteem Development for a Healthier Well-being
For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones
The licensing means that MS would have to disclose whether or not they did. Since they haven't, and since MS are good at that kind of thing, we can say that IE does not include Firefox code.

When Windows had some BSD code the EULA was clear.

(Not sure why your straight forward question got downvoted.)
I'm interested, what is this?
Hell it even runs on TVs!
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/overvi...

Looks like a PhoneGap equivalent based off Java instead of JS rather than 'Xamarin for Java'.

Is there any reason that LLVM can't AOT compile java to machine code? That'd maybe be another way of doing this if people wanted to take the native UI route.
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/the-raid-redemption-2011-...
> I dont believe that , since you can do your own queries with Django , even in RAW sql.

Believe what you want to believe but we have experienced the same thing just couple of months ago and have ditched it completely. Besides if I'm going to write raw SQL then why would I want to use Django's ORM? That would be another layer, too much bureaucracy.

> Django is not a CMS with plugins.

It's just one step away from CMS with plugins. I have doubts about it being a "MVC" framework.
JekyllHub - blogging for developers
All 3 of the listed Wisconsin routers are small businesses. 2 are currently listed as being down, and have been for months now. However, their web pages are up, they probably just changed around their IP's or something, and never notified.

I could see a core router at UW being a major measure of the internet, but not some small consulting company in a small town..
Upgrading to Rails 4 - Parameters Security Tour
Some bits[1] of the Ubuntu community are decidedly sub-optimal.

Less bad than other parts of the Internet, but still not what I'd use as an example of good practice.

[1] Sprawling support, often including support from people who know very little about Linux or Ubuntu; gently toxic development lists.
this one made my day :)
The reality distortion field works on anything - even on making them get excited about their own cake. I'm just kidding, of course. No, not really.
404 Error Pages "Page Not Found" How to Remove Them
That's the problem. As a designer your goal is not to claim that you can design unflawed system. Instead it is to use all your humility (and skills) to design stuff that are simple enough that are unlikely to fail because the complexity level reaches the limit of prevention and ability to analyze the failure modes.

I would like to know how much of the design in places like AWS is made more complex by the requirements of HA itself, but my guess is, a lot.
This is just pure trollbait. It's disappointing to see it on HN, as it doesn't provoke any useful discussion whatsoever.
Show HN: Instrumenting and visualizing JavaScript with d3.js
This is pretty much the same insufferable stuff he goes into when he talks about Microsoft on his podcast. A general ignorance because he never uses the stuff (except long wnough to look for flaws) but that doesn't stop him from being an expert in his mind. I just hit the two minute skip button until I get to the Apple topics where I think he has informed opinions.
Why is X not written in Lisp?
> It's just one step away from CMS with plugins. I have doubts about it being a "MVC" framework.
You have routes, models , views and templates , like any other MVC framework ,so tell me how does it make Django not a MVC framework ?

> Believe what you want to believe but we have experienced the same thing just couple of months ago and have ditched it completely. Besides if I'm going to write raw SQL then why would I want to use Django's ORM? That would be another layer, too much bureaucracy.

I never used Raw Sql with Django yet , i know you can , tell me a specific type of query Django cannot do ?

The problem with folks like you is either they did not wrote the doc , or they assume the framework with do everything for you for free. No framework does that.
Apple stores can also have the irritating experience of five staff and six customers so you can't just buy the thing you came to the store for.
To be honest, EBS is the special sauce that makes me stick with AWS. There are so many little things that become so much easier by having network storage. To me the cost of upgrading or migrating machines using local storage is just not worth the perceived reliability gain to me.
..but he used Microsoft products, 8 years ago! Doesn't that make him an expert on all things Microsoft?
Escape from the ivory tower
It does seem that way, similarly I thought app.net wouldn't reach it's funding goal with a small amount if time to go and it made it easy.
Moving storage locally seems like a good move. When complexity is still too high and there are no ways to make it simpler (I don't think that's the case, btw) relax your requirements.
Didn't we try error codes back in the day? I think exceptions are brilliant. They let you write your error code in one place (at the top of the stack), instead of planning for every contingency at every level.

Once I discovered exceptions back in the 90s, life got a lot easier.

Of course Java ruined exceptions with the invention of the CheckedException, maybe this tainted the Go designers' thinking?
So what?

Apparently from the various posts relating to discussions about Apple some people take the idea of others emulating Apple as a criminal offense, a type of offense in which for them is valid to point the fingers in the face of such companies and repeated yelling: "loser loser."

About your two last paragraphs I dislike this wording but it shows every mark of the fanboy speak, when given the facts that someone made some elements that Apple uses today just say how Apple is significant compared to them, it's the reverse of the above pattern. This is increasingly making me sick.
Collin Fahey has won the internet today in my book. Every single thing he wrote had amazing attention to detail and in many cases was charged with extra meaning. Genius.
Woof - simply exchange files
As visionscaper says, a lot of applications in vision and robotics, but I believe the incredible low power consumption offers broad potential in portable electronics, and also the datacenter. Imagine running an Erlang app on a single box crammed with thousands of these cores and a few TB of RAM.

They understand that the key is getting developers writing software in a new way, and the trick there is ubiquitous hardware. They also understand that it has to start as a co-processor, too, so they've married it to an existing ARM chip to provide peripherals and the host operating system. These decisions are very, very good ones, especially as compared to other multicore processor manufacturers (XMOS and GreenArrays are the two I'm thinking of).
You pretty much agreed with his friend.
Most people seem to love the surface hardware, it's Windows RT I've seen most complaints about. Most people also seem to love the touch cover, and had a better experience than Marco.

I read this entire piece as a critique of the MS store. The Surface just happened to be what he tried to see/mess with; an activity that was constantly interrupted by the sales staff.

I went into my local MS store a few weeks ago (pre-surface). While I didn't encounter pushy salesmen, the rest of the experience was similar. The layout and design was a clear copy of Apple. The uniforms and the way they carried their ID on a lanyard was a clear copy. There was an "XBox Experience" section in the back no one was using. The Windows phones were covered in fingerprints, making it hard to see how nice the screens really were.

They're trying, but it was clear to me they needed some time and experience to round some rough edges.
>> But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown

Well he needs to be something other than a pathetic apple fanboy! :D
Correct, of course. The key unstated requirement is that it's exactly on your schedule and catered to your tastes.

The issue with this idea, at least as I understand it, is that they're generating higher utilization by sharing and perhaps selling deadhead legs. Any of those things (and anything I can think of that drives utilization meaningfully higher) gives up a lot of the flexibility and precision adaptation to the guy-in-back's ever-changing schedule.

I fly my family in our (piston) airplane for most of our travel east of the Mississippi. Even at piston costs and speeds (both way lower than jets), I can usually beat them door-to-door out to 800 miles and I smoke them door to door for everything under 500 miles. Plus, I'm never waiting for my inbound aircraft, getting the free opt-out feelup by TSA, sweating connections or waiting for my bags.

UberJet can deliver on some of those things, but the closer they drive it to part 121 (air carrier) to make it cheaper, the more they'll give up on the advantage side. I suspect they'll give up a lot of advantages and still not have a cost-competitive product. No one will complain about riding x-country in a Citation X, but they may balk at the $7500/hr operating cost.
The time between about 1860 and 1910 seems totally magical to me.

For all of history, people lived, loved, and died. Aside from perhaps a few of them writing their thoughts down, they totally disappeared.

With the invention of still photography, and much more audio and moving-picture recording technology, suddenly you could see and hear people who were long gone.

These folks are not just dead. Their kids are dead, their grandkids are dead, their great-grandkids are probably also gone. Yet we are able to hear them play music, tell stories, and laugh. They might even tell a joke and we can laugh along with it.

It's as if mankind suddenly came out of a very dark tunnel. We are finally able to really coalesce into a multi-generational conversation about what our humanity means. (A little too poetic. Apologies. I just find it amazing)
The entire tone of his post from the outset seemed like he really had an axe to grind. It was like reading an article Fox News would publish about an Obama rally.
It's arguable that the Pascal-style declarations are superior in readability.

I've discussed this with colleagues in the past, and those who were raised with English as their native language, for example, often find C-style declarations easier to comprehend. They find the adjective (that is, the type) coming before the noun (the variable name) more natural.

The opposite happens for those whose native language is one where adjectives follow nouns. They find the Pascal convention easier to comprehend.
It demonstrated the inherit problems with the box model (of delivery).