skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Visiting their store feels like you've stepped into a Halloween horror movie.

The staff must be forced to take lithium at the start of each shift. At the Microsoft store in Chicago, it's not only empty and in the least 'cool' part of the city (distant suburbs), but the constant demos felt like I was a victim in a Saw movie. I had to enthusiastically play a Kinect game... or else.
The original idea to do this came as a result of extrapolating this trend to add custom processing features to general purpose processing microprocessors in the form of SOCs. If you extrapolate out from the SOC, over time, the role of the microprocessor becomes less and less significant and that of the special function circuits more so. Khitchdee's approach was to start at the other end of the continuum.
> Back when Firefox 2 was released (six years ago this week!),
> the Internet Explorer team started a friendly tradition of sending Mozilla a cake
> as congratulations. This continued for Firefox 3 and Firefox 4.

This finally explains why they changed to the more frequent release schedule.
That reminds me of a story that I read ages ago. It happened in the 1980s.

This group of programmers had taken to exercising while waiting for compiles. They were all buff. Then Turbo Pascal came out and they all turned back into couch potatoes. :-)
Without criticism, nothing will improve.
I don't why would an adult would even bother to write something like this.
DNS is the other problem too.
To me peaked seems to imply that they will be going down quickly, and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. Look at the amount of money they've been making, and then look at their market share. Macs, it's tiny. iPhones, where they make 50% of their profit, it's half of samsung. Yes they dominate in tablets, but that is a rapidly growing market. They can lose share and still grow there.

It seems to me that the way the phone business is they don't really need to do anything special at all and they will make about 50 billion profit next year. That makes them undervalued in my opinion, just based on the fundamentals.

Now, do I think they are going to a trillion market cap in 3 months, not at all. But I think at this level they are a much better buy than sell. If only for the dividend that is likely to be growing by large amounts. all this being said i agree that samsung is also a buy. They are selling huge amounts of phones, and they are also selling the components for lots of others (though i think i just read they stopped selling screens to apple maybe?)
Does git push+pull not count as a "good sync service"?
Is it just me, or does the Article really does comes across as quite snarky in tone rather than an honest observation of what he saw ?
What I learned from my First Entrepreneurial Venture
> "New York to LA on a private jet is worse than commercial because you are stuck in a 6 foot diameter pipe for 4.5 hours, rather than a first class seat on a normal airplane."

I have not had the opportunity to compare commercial first class travel to private jets, but my hunch is that 9/10 people would prefer a private jet, even ignoring the convenience factor of skipping the TSA and flying on your own schedule. In first class you get a seat. In a private jet, you get the jet.
Your friend is out of the loop. I am one of the Go readability reviewers, and I review thousands of lines of Go code each week. The code is written by Googlers from different teams around the world.

It is true that Go is in the minority compared to C++ and Java. Change takes time at a company of this size. But the graphs are all up and to the right, and the rate of Go code being written at Google is accelerating.
I agree that the flexible layout approach is pretty nice (and obviously we're seeing Apple move towards this direction with autolayout), but I'm not a big fan of the fragment API. They sounded better in theory than they've worked out in practice, IMO.

The inability to nest fragments in other fragments makes doing certain things like fragment based tabs or viewpagers rather awkward. And since the fragment lifecycle almost but doesn't quite match up with the activity lifecycle, some extra careful bookkeeping is required to make sure state is transferred properly upon rotation since the entire thing gets destroyed and recreated.

Anyway, the biggest problem for me on Android is that although the new APIs in 3.0 and 4.0 are pretty sweet, I can't use most of them due to having to maintain compatibility back to 2.2 (Froyo). ActionBarSherlock and the compatibility library help a bit, but it's not quite the same.
Why doesn't AppEngine degrade by browning out low priority services (free tier, batch jobs, low paying customers) instead of overloading themselves?
Parallella reached $750k funding goal
Matthewrudy is right. The legislation for regulating Cantonese in broadcast and print media was enacted in Guangzhou, not Hong Kong. My mistake.

No politicians would say outright that they want to eliminate a major language, but they could drastically reduce its usage by imposing specific restrictions. And not just on spoken Cantonese, but variations of written Chinese other than the official simplified characters.

I wish I could post an original article here with more details, but for some reason even the bilingual news sites don't cover this story in English. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Anti-Cantonese_regulations. The sources are all in Chinese (the only English link appears to be dead) but Google's translations weren't too bad.
I can already see it: funds permitting, we'll take Uber cars to the airport and then catch a BlackJet to our final destination.
Dropbox is revocable, the issue is for how long. In addition to online versions, the client holds on to old versions for three days. It used to be longer but the cache could get unreasonably large.
Depends on the criticism. Constructive criticism, sure. Blinkered, petty, negative criticism from someone who made up his mind years ago? Not so much.
Curious -- why so? Reviews that I read seemed to indicate that the mail application was quite weak (e.g. can't even drag and drop mail into folders).
Go doesn't have this problem because the Go Team doesn't believe that testing frameworks are a valid concept.
For and If and Errorf are good enough for anyone.
Doesnt't feel biased? Was I reading the same post?
did you buy it?
Xooglers: "The TGIF Show" from 1999
Sometimes. There is also a flawed system that can auto-hellban people unlucky enough to get a bunch of downvotes on an early comment, before they have a karma buffer.
yes, the farther and farther you travel from silicon valley, microsoft products look more and more appealing. :)
Arguing quick examples and metaphors has never been useful to anyone except the arguer's ego. The salesdude actually tried to address Marco's underlying question (in what ways can you expand this thing?), even though it was clear Marco was there just for trolling. Surface love or hate nonwithstanding, this is an embarrassing post from start to finish.
Now this is smart!
They hate it because it sucks. His whole article is about how much and why it sucks.

Then he concludes that maybe it doesn't suck. Maybe it's just him.

It reminds me of Winston Smith, wondering whether it's he that's insane after all.
Remember Vitess? It sits in front of all of YouTube's databases. Every time you load a page on YouTube, the database queries go through Vitess.

http://code.google.com/p/vitess/

It's a sweet program, and if it stops working, then YouTube gets smashed by a fail whale. Would that be the kind of thing you're looking for?
It's kind of a ram hog, though.
If you were right then our traffic wouldn't have increased five-fold in one hour, and you probably wouldn't have expended the effort to comment.
Oh good! I've posted about the project on HN a couple of times, but being $150k short of the goal yesterday with only 24 hours to go I wasn't optimistic.
I feel bad for Microsoft. When you are first with a new product with great benefits, everyone forgives your missteps, because it's the only one - the best there is. But when you copy, you are competing with something that has been through iterations of feedback and corrections and bugfix and improvement. You are held to that higher standard, even though you're just starting out!

Also, in the past, Apple regulated the user-experience with the Mac (whereas the PC was open), which seems to have been too constraining. It might seem that history could repeat here, but there's a crucial difference: tablets are now a consumer device, like Sony used to make.
> It was like arguing with a Tea Partier.

I'm sorry, but why was this comparison necessary?
Overeager and abundant is at least better than useless or nonexistent.
Apple stores so crowded, its hard to get the attention of the sales guys. They are super busy, even on a monday morning. In santa clara, the microsoft store is right in front of apple store. Once I went to apple store on a monday morning, to fix my wife's phone. The apple store was packed at 10.30 AM, I had to wait 2 hours to get it fixed. So, to kill time I went into the microsoft store, which was literally empty. There were more staff than customers. I don't know why microsoft is opening stores.
I try to follow every gripe with a positive comment amount something (else) to get back in the saddle of good spirits.
Instead of points for correct answers the result of the test should be defined as probability of such set of responses to be achieved by chance only. :-)
Yeah, the quote refers to people, not products.
I think all of the keynotes at OOPSLA this year were surprisingly engaging.

I've seen a lot of Go talks from various Googlers, and I have to say that this was the best-motivated, most humble, and most honest of them that I have seen. Rob knew he was speaking to an extremely PL-oriented audience, and structured his talk accordingly, and the result was fantastic. Go comes from a very different standpoint than almost all academic PL work, and in that respect, for those of us in academia, it's an interesting breath of fresh air and a reminder of the uniquely fine line between industry and academia in computer science.
True, but maybe the nature of the demand has changed, as computers have matured into consumer devices.

However... if some new way of using computers comes along, it seems more likely to emerge in a more open system (like windows or android or linux) than in a closed one. Or maybe at the level of ARM SoC, with its own hardware.
You just explained the problem yourself. You are lugging two devices around, two devices that could easily be equally powerful but at the moment mostly are
distinguished by different software.
Same reason beautiful women and celebrities seem "bitchy". It is their way of handling DDOS attacks.
It's a shame to see Marco panning the Surface so thoroughly. It's apples and oranges. On the one hand, comparing brand new hardware (one day old) with 4th generation hardware and on the other hand comparing brand new software (again, one day old) with version 6 software.

Despite the criticisms of some of the execution here and there (e.g., the pointless animations), it's clear if you've done any reading that a tremendous amount of research and UX work went into this--but it's a v1 product and many of the apps are written by groups other than MS.

I got a chance to use the Surface today and the thing that I came away with was that this could be a person's only computer. As an example, you can browse the file system, run desktop apps, and copy files to external storage. I can't say that about an iPad. Everyone I know who owns an iPad (myself included) also has a second computer somewhere--often in the same bag.

The other thing I came away with was that Microsoft is open and Apple is closed. Why can't I plug a microSD card into any Apple product? Why can't I plug in a USB device? You can plug your camera into the Surface (it's a host) and download pictures to your local machine. MS has several capacities and price points, just like Apple, but they're not afraid to let you use external storage.

I believe in a future with open computing and, firmware lock downs notwithstanding, MS is far more open than Apple.
If you don't mind saying - in what way do you find it a breath of fresh air? I ask because I am very much a Linux guy, not a Microsoft and definitely not an Apple guy - but my iPad has completely revolutionized the way I use computers. I guess the main draw is filesystem access, right?
>I never liked Go, but I admit I like it a lot more if it means I don't have to deal with Maven and other dependency systems as much like the slides say.

Hrm, yeah, there are alternatives here. (Not in Java-land...other places.)

> I've been doing Android since it came out, but before that I was J2EE, and it could be hell if Hibernate needed a different version of a dep than something else in your code stack, for example.

You really should look into Clojure.
Dropbox is way simpler than that. It syncs precisely one folder.

There is really no way for it to not sync file deletions without making a massive clutter.
Crime/Horror: Jack the Ripper - Who was He?
To be honest, it's time to ban Macro's blog from HN. Every time one of his trollbait posts hits the frontpage of this site (and they somehow always do), we have these exact same discussions about how him and Gruber and Siegler are incapable of looking at the technology industry without bias.
"The TGIF Show" from 1999 at Google (video)
The slides (and plenty other Go literature) describe the metrics used to decide Go features in quite a lot of detail. If these metrics are applicable in your context, then Go is more likely to "make your life better" than Haskell.

Can you point out to specific PL research results that Go has outright ignored, rather than decided against for X reasons?
Just look at the caption of third image. He is so much into trolling that he didn't mind pulling his son into it.
I may be wrong but as far as I know setting the output to 24 bit only makes sense if your music actually is in 24 Bit. Whatever you set in the Audio/Midi configuration is used as system-wide default output signal - including iTunes and so on. Of course you want to avoid any further conversion in your signal chain, which is why it is recommended to match the output configuration in Audio/Midi settings with the bit depth and sample rate of your music library, which most likely will be 44,1 KHz/16 Bit - unless, of course, you got your hands on higher quality masters.

Considering your advice of setting the output to 24 Bit while your audio collection is (most likely) encoded in 16 Bit, should trigger a conversion while outputting the audio signal - this conversion is useless, of course, as you can't turn this material into something it isn't (imagine upscaling 720p video to 1080p, new packaging, same old content/quality). Yet, and correct me if I'm wrong, the conversion still happens and alters the signal.

So, to avoid this match those audio/midi settings with your music library. There are also expensive iTunes alternatives that deal with this problem by adjusting the output settings to the currently playing audio file on the fly - in case your library consists of mixed bit depth/sample rates. I don't use those solutions though.
Looking forward to getting my Epiphany next year. What an exciting time to be alive.
>>The staff loved Adam so much that he later vomited in the Apple Store.

There was also a storm in Africa and an earthquake on moon (Titan's) because of it. Marco, right?

>>People who dislike Apple’s approach or whose requirements are incompatible with it will always exist in great numbers, and the Surface is for them.

Breaking news: Before writing this post, Marco, Gruber and Siegler participated in their personal marathon group masturbation session.

>>Apple’s products say, “You can’t do that because we think it would suck.” Microsoft’s products say, “We’ll let you try to do anything on anything if you really want to, even if it sucks.”

Proof of concept: Marco missed analogy, logic and common sense classes; not particularly in given order.

What will happen if Apple closes shop somehow?

Well, for one, I will be sad to say goodbye to such an awesome company and its good products but Marco will show symptoms of menopause.
This continued good-natured back-and-forth is nice to see. Kind of reminds me of something Stephen Potter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Potter) would have done, had he been in the tech industry :)
That's kind of a grandiose comparison don't you think? 1984 is a cautionary (prescient?) fable about a totalitarianistic dystopia and the other is a tedious rant about consumer electronics in a shopping mall.
Unverifiable anecdote from Apple fanboy does not equal data.
I came here to post this. This article is so grossly biased by someone who made up their mind a long time ago. The writing is so poor and clearly attacks the silliest stuff that is unrelated to the product itself. This person is clearly jealous? of microsoft copying the apple store approach. It's such a weird article to make it to the top of hacker news. I guess that's a late Friday night for you.
Yes (I don't keep this a secret, it's right on my userinfo page). How does that pertain to this thread?
I can't speak for MG, but Gruber and Marco definitely do not automatically dislike anything non-Apple. Read both of their writings on WebOS or Windows Metro UI for a positive spin on non-apple products or their writing on Game Center, Ping, App Store reviews for an anti-Apple slant.

Both men have a strong appreciation for usability, look-and-feel, intuitiveness and consistency in their electronic gadgets. They both get pigeon-holed as Apple apologists because Apple is the only major electronics manufacturer that seems to care one iota about these things, but when another company comes along and gets theses details right, neither Marco or Gruber will hesitate to praise them.
FWIW, once Amazon decided that an availability zone is an unreliable unit (and they tell you this up front, and strongly suggest running multiple AZ architectures for anything where you require reliability), then any cascading failure mode in a single AZ is not something you'd expect them to spend too much time protecting against. Sure, the cascade from EBS faults to RDS and ELB meant this affected more of their single AZ customers than it would have otherwise, but anyone using a singe AZ knew upfront that Amazon advised against that, and never claimed they intended to provide high-availability in single AZs.

So yeah, you're right - these systemic failures can be anticipated, and Amazon's advice (to spread your important infrastructure across multiple AZs) would have protected users from most of this. (I feel quite a lot of sympathy for the engineers involved in the cross-AZ failures this incident revealed - the multi-AZ RDS and ELB failures are things customers doing everything they were told got bitten by anyway, and are probably rightly annoyed...)
Of course Apple changed the way in-person selling of computers. If you need evidence of this today, find a Best Buy. That was your option before the Apple Store way of doing it.

The last time I was in an Apple store (more than a year ago) I grabbed what I needed and then a kind woman walked up to me and double-checked that was what the item my MacBook needed. She scanned my card right there and I left knowing my Gmail account had a receipt mailed to it. The whole thing took 5 minutes. And the store was crowded at the time too! It was exactly how I would want a retail experience to be. She double checked, then I paid and left. bam.

Before the Apple Store, where could you go to get EVEN REMOTELY the same experience? Best Buy? Circuit City? Oh no wait, I know, CompUSA! Sure, buddy.

(I know some will try to denounce me as just an Apple fanboy. To that I would point out that for years I exclusively used Linux so I feel fine looking down on both Apple and Microsoft :P That said, it is just that in this instance, Microsoft is clearly playing catch up.)
Can you elaborate on how market inefficiency is the issue? It seems others have tried similar schemes (Virgin America ran a private jet website with the same intentions), or attempted to open the market through smaller "taxi" planes (Embraer Phenom) or wholly regional airlines (Independence Air), but the cost of fuel and labor prevented increased adoption.

The private jet market is scheduled at the last minute and filling unused seats (or return segments) seems to be quite challenging, even if offered as one way last minute deals to consumers. Is the goal to have a Southwest like "Ding" fare alert for subscribers?
The whole thing is starting to remind me a lot of conservative talk radio/TV. The clique of Apple tech pundit A-listers reliably delivers a predictable message to willing listeners/readers. They are not in general good tech reviewers IMHO, and they fill the gap with an exceedingly arrogant and condescending tone. But, like conservative broadcasters, they probably are making a lot of money doing their quasi-tech-related button pushing.

It is a bit annoying to see apparently sharp people looking so often brainwashed, but I more or less ignore it at this point.
The way I see it:

golang: small, simple description, download link, platforms, and UTF (editable!) hello world all far "above the fold" and following that nice "F" shape for where they put important information. very plain. very efficient.

ruby-lang looks like a web 2.0 CRM-built site. So much wasted space, so little obvious flow or prioritization of elements, even on the main page.

And the others attempt to describe things instead of demonstrating them, use a lot of vertical space for big images that don't inform you of anything, and generally hide the real meat a scroll away for what reason? They don't make a sale if I hit the big green button, but they do get a totally-uninformed poke at their system, generally leading to a crappy first experience.

--

I'm not at all a fan of the slide show interface, but I certainly don't find it a bad thing that they aren't high on Photoshop fumes. Though they can sometimes be used to great effect, they aren't generally informationally dense, which programmers often prefer.
Not sure it is harder than I think.
Other than that, I haven't nothing else to disagree with. :)
Carbon 29er Tubeless Wheels
You left out "Green if everything is working - except the Chaos Monkey. All systems are working properly, but none of them failing randomly 'for your convenience'"
I'm more interested in knowing how the iPad revolutionized the way you use computers. I find it more hassle to keep mine charged then find a use for it besides reading news sites on the toiler.
So? What would you do about it?

It's a risk the "target" won't talk to you, but there is little downside. They might think you are a pushy jerk, but they aren't going to do anything. They will just immediately forget you.

If you don't talk them, then nothing will ever happen, guaranteed.
Thinking about how dropbox might be implemented I wonder if the following series of events is possible:

1) Process which syncs files to the server fails to get access to a local fils, sees it as length 0

2) Process proceeds to tell the server file is length 0 and the server updates the file to be 0 length.

3) Access to the local file is restored and client notices that the server file is 'newer' than the local client version and it was length zero so it truncates the client copy to length 0.

The thing is, I can imagine a number of scenarios where the local file might seem to be zero length (oplocks on NTFS volumes being one)
It was important for the overall motif he repeated throughout the piece that the salespeople seemed to be forcing the issue too much and weren't personally invested. (How could they be? The store has been open for less than a month.)
We aren't normal people, though. The vast majority of computer users do not carry around a laptop to work on.