skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Having not invented any of the products it is known for, why should we expect Microsoft to invent its way out of declining markets? We shouldn’t

But Microsoft isn't trying it invent its way out of declining markets. They're trying to copy thier way into new markets - in this case smartphone and tablet. It's what they've always done with great success, it's what they will continue to try. (They're often referred to as "fast follower".)

For this reason, I think Cringley is wrong in his conclusions. Microsoft is a lot of things, but likely to just give up is not one of them.

Yes, MS is trying to get better at inventing. No game-changers have come from that yet. MS is trying to get better as design - surface, Win8 and winphone8 are the best example of that yet. Make of that what you will.
I wonder if anyone at DEC or Data General gave much thought to the Altair 8800 and what it meant for their product lines. I think the innovation wave has moved from the PC to the Post-PC devices (or whatever term we end up with). We are 5 years from the iPhone or about the 1980 timeframe for the PC. The minicomputer was still a player in the 80's.

There will always be a need for certain segments to have more computing power, but the average consumer is getting very close to being served by tablets and smart phones. They can print wirelessly and add a keyboard when needed. Simpler ways to get a bigger screen for work are probably a given.

I expect the PC to become a hobbyist / Professional machine, and the tablets / smart phones to be for everyone else.
If ruby is such an amazing language, why not ditch rails and rewrite it in 2 months with pure ruby ?
I did knew only few of them, so it's nice, someone covered this many tools.
Can we change the headline to mention that this article was written in 2007? I'm quite sure both PHP and RoR have come a long way in a little over five years.
Likely falling on the 'old' side of the spectrum of posters here, I can't help but feel quite sentimental when I see these kind of articles - and regret, once again, that I wasn't born earlier so I could a) participate in the 'when it was still fun' age of computer hardware development and b) be retired by now!
The automatic grading has a huge advantage: It is nearly real-time, and improving the solution and re-submitting improves your score.

Having been a teaching assistant who corrected programming assignments (and also a student), I always wondered how many of the students would read my comments, would go back to their solution and actually improve it. Probably none. If I (as a student) received a comment about a solution I submitted two weeks ago, I often didn't instantly know what the corrector talked about. I had to go back to look at my code. I'm not sure I always did that when I was busy. Additionally, I think even if I acknowledged the comment, I wouldn't actually go ahead and fix my solution.

I'm taking the scala course right now, and when I submit a solution and something is flagged, my thoughts are right in the code, I still have all the files open in vim, sbt running... so I can instantly go and fix it. And there is a real incentive to do that, because my score will improve.
How do you type quotes? I stumbled on the fact that my keyboard's "minus" key outputs an equals sign, but quotes I can't get. I grew up on the C64, not this one.
My learnings from 500 Startups – the first month
Driverless cars solve these problems that most people have ...

1. A need for status. Driverless cars will first greatly distinguish luxury cars from more ordinary cars.

2. Convenience and comfort. Driverless cars will remove the stress from rush hour commuting. Driverless cars will be much more comfortable for long-distance trips.

3. Safety. Driverless cars will obey the traffic laws. "drivers" and passengers of such cars will much less likely be arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

4. Efficiency. Driverless cars will use less fuel than otherwise comparable self-drive cars. For example, cooperating driverless cars can draft at highway speeds. Additionally, driverless cars can smooth out stop-and-go traffic, coast down hills and otherwise conserve momentum. And once driverless cars are commonplace, intelligent intersections will permit cooperating driverless cars to interleave without stopping - while accommodating self-drive cars with conventional signs and signals.
Personally I come to HN every time a new thing comes out because I specifically want to know what this circle of people think of it. There is a unique and informed perspective here.
No mud-slinging or hyperbole, just solid reasons why PHP works better for him in this case.

Coding in different languages definitely does make you look at coding from different perspectives, and you can often apply those lessons back to other languages.
This article was on HN 6 months ago. PHP sucks.
I thought PC's were the ones who were dead?
If you need to analyze things that live in your database (users, transactions, actions on your site), I recommend RJMetrics.

I work for Shutterstock, a company that is now large enough to have gone through several phases of data maturity (we recently became a publicly traded company, which requires a high standard of data integrity and auditability).

We use a variety of tools to look at data: Google Analytics for traffic, a home grown BI and A/B testing framework, Great Plains for financials, our own open source toolkits for client side event tracking and data visualization (http://bits.shutterstock.com/?p=277 | http://code.shutterstock.com/), and RJMetrics to track and explore KPIs for our smaller business units that don't have dedicated analyst teams.

RJMetrics makes it incredibly easy to explore and visualize data without having to spend dev time pulling different views. They also have native support for things like cohort analysis and customer lifetime value (which saves a TON of time in Excel). In addition to the dashboards they provide (that a non-technical person can change and improve) they also have regular automated emails that help you and the team feel the rhythm of your business.

Basically: unless you are ready to devote a team of BI analysts to your product, RJMetrics gets you 95% of what you need with 5% of the effort of rolling something on your own. You'd be crazy to try and replicate this kind of functionality at an early stage of your business.
He is comapring apples to oranges here.

The language PHP to the _framework_ Rails.

He didn't find the language (ruby) unsuitable, but rather the framework (rails) too heavy. This might of been exactly the same if he tried PHP with Zend/Symphony/etc.

His bottom line should of been: "Sometimes its better to work without a framework".
1. Can you imagine Top Gear proclaiming driverless cars as the way to get status? No. They'll be ridiculed by anyone who knows anything about cars (Same way people who drive an automatic are ridiculed). Imagine "Drag and drop programming is the future of software development!!!"

2. Not convinced anyone really gets stressed driving, and not convinced that "not being in control of the car" would make anyone less stressed. Personally, when someone else is driving the car, I'm always more stressed not less. If I knew it was being driven by some software, my stress level would hit the roof. Everything I own that has "software", crashes every now and then. I don't really want my car to have more software than it needs.

3. Software bugs are plentiful in any system. Simple mechanics, and humans will always trump software for things like this. Surely if this stuff was so easy to automate, we'd have software flying planes already (Which seems a substantially easier problem).

4. Considering that we still can't make automatic cars that change gear at the right point, I'm skeptical.
thanks! i didnt realize this!.
Why inbreeding is bad for your community
First step, convert carpool lanes to driverless lanes (which will exceed the capacity of the rest of the roadway). Next, require driverless cars for all controlled access highways. It will happen more slowly in the US, faster in China where they are more willing to mandate progress.

People who want to drive would do so on regular roadways. Within 20 years, virtually all cars would be driverless-capable, and society would have a clear idea of the advantages and whether to allow old school driving anywhere.

I dont buy the dystopian terrorist hacker paranoia. More and more of the physical world will be controlled by software. We will either make that secure or go back to living in caves.
Desktops and laptops don't have to be "replaced by tablets and smartphones" for the latter to eventually outnumber the former by ten to 1 or more.

In which light, Windows 8 makes more sense - it's worth annoying x existing users in order to gain 10x new users.

Though a lot of people who used to use laptops for home email and facebook are now perfectly served by tablets and phones.
What the article saying isn't specified to MOOC, i.e. think about continuous integration vs code review - they are not contradictory.

MOOC is not going to replace formal education and I think the "limitations" mentioned are perfectly acceptable due to the issues of costs and incentives involved, e.g. In the Coursera's Scala course, there are more than 10K+ weekly assignment submissions, you must need a scalable assessment method. (The grader is not bad in fact, i.e. knows cyclomatic complexity, warn if you use mutable collections etc)
And the great cycle begins again...
It looks like CSS 3D transformed elements are rendered as bitmaps.
Or rather just a different framework. I wasn't a Rubyist in 2007, but certainly now Sinatra (especially with Padrino) is worthy of consideration.
You can tell this article is old when it reads: "...opened a new empty Subversion respository".
The whole upvoting/downvoting concept seems to be aimed at recreating communities where the majority can shout down any minorities. At the village level. A fear tactic aimed at making you subconsciously consider whether what you say will please the majority.

Ironic that it's called "karma", which is a complete perversion of the original religious meaning of the concept, perverted into a means of recording a "permanent record" of how antisocial or unsubmissive you've been to community opprobrium. Purely regressive adaptation of technology, and a crime against the spirit of those who created it.
How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout
http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe...

But the layout is just one of the problems. The key staggering is also not very ergonomic. There are two cool keyboards featuring symmetric key positioning:

- Truly ergonomic keyboard
http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php

- Type matrix
http://typematrix.com
Could Sandy Storm Lead To Another AWS Outage?
If you have AWS deployments in US-EAST, it's good to move latest copy of backups to US-WEST and be prepared for BCP.
Survive yes, relevance no, not when you serve a legacy market.
ICal on iPad 2 crashes when selecting March 2013
I wouldn't bet on Minneapolis. The local tax laws are pretty harsh, the weather has some extremes, rent and housing are higher than they should be, and it is not a young person friendly area. Plus, the UoM isn't really a tech school and the tech scene isn't going to recover from out sourcing and Medtronics / Fingerhut's problems.

I believe one of the states in the upper plains could become a tech capital if they worked at it, but MN is problematic and everyone else sees oil coming.
This is an old story. He eventually switched back to Rails [1] : My former company (CD Baby) was one of the first to loudly switch to Ruby on Rails, and then even more loudly switch back to PHP… This book by Michael Hartl came so highly recommended that I had to try it, and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial is what I used to switch back to Rails again… Though I’ve worked my way through many Rails books, this is the one that finally made me “get” it.

Understanding a framework is a long and sometimes tough process. That's the only lesson to be learned.

[1] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
An Open Letter to E-Book Retailers: Let’s have a return to common sense
Well-writen.
Private fork. Problem solved.
Runs painfully slow on my Fx 16.0.2 install on Win7 x64 system :(
That is a viable approach and I share your affinity for that type of architecture, but insisting that it is the only way to build large scale systems is not reasonable. In real life, for example, you have clients and clients have their preferences or requirements or existing systems. And system architects also like having choices.

And speaking of choice in context of massively concurrent CSP systems, Erlang is (as of now) the superior choice for that sort of system architecture.
Mission Critical Software Needs Better Developer Testing
Show HN: Parson, lighweight json parser in C
IBM is a poor choice for anybody with ambition to work with latest cool web frameworks doing 'social-X'. If your ambition is in chip design, AI, massive data processing, quantum computing and more theoretical work, then IBM probably isn't too bad a place.
It is comments like this which make me dislike reading the comments of any article with "php" in the title. Not only is it extremely biased, it is presented without any facts or logic to back it up and should be taken as it is given, an opinion.

PHP is an extremely powerful language for building websites and has come along way since it's original release, such as object-orientation, etc.

Admittedly, PHP has many flaws, such as poor error handling (for a newcomer, most veterans in this language know them off by hand and actually find them useful) and poor function naming, some are CamelCase, some are under_scored and some are illegiblyalloneword, but every language has flaws.

This is really the kind of cool-kid attitude which HN doesn't need, it shows a lack of due thought and that you have little to no experience of the language itself, if you had, your comment would have been. "This article was on HN 6 months ago, but, I believe that RoR is better than PHP for these reasons... " and not simple "PHP sucks."
Because Ruby isn't designed purely for making websites. You at least need to use Rack (or a similar API) to hook into a server.

PHP has a lot of features built in which make it almost comparable to a framework. This is because it is designed for making websites out of the box, Ruby is not.
I was kind of hoping this would be a petition for keyboard manufacturers...

I still don't get how shitty keyboards are still included in laptops and keyboard designs. I mean I remember using one keyboard with a backspace key the size of a number key and one where the restart button was near home.
I'm a cofounder of rjmetrics. You probably won't be surprised to learn that we have all of our data from billing, product usage, google analytics, zendesk, hubspot, fogbugz, etc in our rjmetrics account. We give access to all of our employees and our board.

There are a lot of great tools out there, and we think ours is best at consolidating, analyzing, and acting on the data that ecommerce and saas companies have. We don't collect new data for you, which is the focus of a lot of the other tools mentioned on this thread.

My cofounder actually has a guest post on techcrunch today about the things to consider when buying or building an analytical system and trying to create a data driven company: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/27/lessons-for-data-driven-bus...
here's the original hand-drawn version of the cave that i used to use http://bit.ly/S5SRIK
I don't think its really reasonable to say 'X sucks' without taking uses cases into account. While PHP has a number of shortcomings, it is great for things where ruby/rails would be huge waste of time. Build some small brochure websites in rails, and build the same ones in PHP. I bet you'll be done much sooner & deployed more cost effectively using PHP. This might not be the kind of work you aspire to doing, but I think the example still holds.
Ideas are on one of the greatest apps ever made: Evernote

Then I start a folder in Google Docs to keep everything related to the project.
There is plenty of evidence that shows the negative effects of gray markets on manufacturers. The long-term macroeconomic effects that these types of issues have on manufacturers can be devastating.

Negative effects may or may not be compensated by the benefits accrued by consumers. Can you point me to the evidence that suggests that it would be devastating?

No doubt. But regulations exist in society for a reason...

Sure; whether this specific one actually solves the problem -and without causing bigger ones- is a different matter, though. Losing first-sales rights seems a rather important problem to me.
This looks fantastic on an iPwn 4s. Well done.
It does seem odd, but my explanation is the "I know I'm moving" problem. If you have mandatory rotations[1], then optimizing for a better next jump is just smart behavior. You know you're leaving so optimize for "flashy" improvements and curry favor with superiors. Its the known deadline that's the problem.

That being said, people should move on at some point. The US Navy before and after WWII rotated out its officers to Washington DC. It made sure operational experience was put into policy. Bringing someone home to teach is a smart move.

[1] a typical IT strategy for managers doing the rotation to "learn new areas" is to cut Q&A people. The effects of the cuts will be a lower budget in the near term with looks good. The next person will get to deal with the slipping quality since the down effects take a while as "professionals" work harder to keep the trains running. Burnout occurs during the next dudes shift.
I think that once driverless cars are mainstream, which I have no doubt will eventually happen, it can usher in the age of the (driverless) flying car... finally! There seems like quite a bit of technological overlap, and from a safety standpoint I would much rather have people flying around in automated vehicles than human controlled.

If this came to be, coupled with high speed wireless, I would go so far as predicting the end of cities as we know them. They would serve essentially no purpose anymore.
I agree that market share is important, but I think Microsoft will face some serious issues turning market share into profit. Both Apple and Amazon skim the profits off their huge ecosystem here, but Microsoft doesn't have any equivalent.
Out of curiousity whereabouts are you based? I'm in the UK and have about 5 different USB chargers, and they all play nice with each other.
For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed.

So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the part of the keyboard that you would optimize for. Typing 5 minutes a day at a relaxed pace would be enough time to cover each of those 8 times in a month, so collecting enough data to work with would be feasible pretty quickly. I was then going to take a big textual corpus of English, and the total of all transition times would serve as the fitness function.

I had the data collection program done, and was starting to collect data, when I decided I should redo it with triples (of which there are 35,937). Then the length of the data collection process I was looking at became really daunting, and I lost interest in the project.

What I'd quite like to do, though, would be to crowdsource the data collection using a web app. Then I could get good three-key data and not have it biased to my own personal quirks.
If you're going to act like a jerk in all your posts, which I actually have no problem with, I'd suggest removing your full name and bio from your HN account 'about' section.
Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations Of Wired and Wireless Keyboards[2009]
That may be the case, but some of the rhetoric their leadership espouses indicates otherwise.
Steve Jobs' Yacht 'Venus' Launched in the Netherlands
Yup, that was my reading, too.
I was actually just reading through his comments now and noted that a few of them had been offensive.
It uses just one function from jQuery, `isNumeric`, which is a function that is a one liner.

And if you follow the project again, you will see that it has become a regular non-jQuery library.
I don't think utilization (without taking into account the number of passangers) is important, as peff pointed out.

What will change demand is that the car occupancy rate will grow. And since one doesn't need to own a car anymore, the number of cars will be reduced.
Bringing together strangers on the same route will get a lot easier in the future. And if one isn't using one's own car but essentially a taxi, we'll see a lot more ride sharing. Especially, if some of the oil price horror scenarios (at least partly) play out.

Right now, the car occupancy rate in the US is around 1.6[1]. Imagine it going up to 2, which is around the rate of some Eastern European countries a couple of years ago[2]. I think it will be even higher.

Another thing to consider is the demand change, since the usage changes (to some degree) and the buyers change (renting companies instead of consumers). If that benefits domestic car manufacturers, idk.

[1]http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw...

[2]http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/term29-occupa...
I thought Rutgers was actually a harder/better school than NYU, at least for engineering. Rutgers is obviously better for film studies.
Out of curiosity, do you have any references to support non-staggered keys are superior? I ask because (100 - ε)% of claims about ergonomics are completely unsupported by scientific research.
Top ten lists are always awful. Even John Peel said that his "Festive Fifty" was lousy, and that people should look at the music in the 51-100 positions.

[1] (http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/festive50.htm)
Do Mozilla devs read HN? This is significantly slower in Firefox (Nightly) than on Chrome (Canary). I hope it's someone's job to go through all the CSS posts that make it near the top of HN and figure out what needs to be done to make FF better.
Concerning your 3rd point, there are some specific tasks in which Machine Learning algorithms beat humans by a significant margin (fraud detection, biomedical pattern matching, to name a few). Considering the recent engineering prowesses that incorporated ML, I think it's safe to assume that in a near future more tasks will be taken over by better-performing-than-humans software (for very specific tasks IMO).
It is a productive purpose, but a very obvious one — designing a 3D object requires 3D display.

We keep seeing impressive 3D interfaces for regular everyday tasks in sci-fi movies, so I was just wondering whether this way of displaying information actually is useful.
Domain parsing is hard. PublicSuffix service seems to be the best way of doing it. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/288810/get-the-subdomain-...
It seems likely that downvoting won't help any more than upvoting or flagging. All would be done on people's personal preferences. All would result in lists that will annoy some folk.

As I see it the problem is not that 'fluff' gets to the front page. The problem is that the hackernews community is now sufficiently large that there are groups who have very different ideas of what 'fluff' is.
I would be curious which countries those are? Is their a 1st world country that doesn't license their cabs to provide an artificial scarcity? Heck, some cities actually mandate the brand of car that can be used for a cab.
Kobo says you cannot share your account: not with a spouse, your kids, anyone