skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't even trust the original blogger is being completely up-front and honest with us. He was going for the sensationalist angle from the start, and to have Facebook call him and ask for his help was just too rich for him to handle.

Ack, coverup! Ack, censorship!

FB needs to find out which app did this. Give them a chance.
When "prestige" and proxies substitute for quality is when I do no longer want to be part of that industry.

Accounting and consultants are good examples. They aren't higher quality, esp compared to cost. They just have better PR, marketing, and thus provide an out when the shit hits the fan. "Hey, I picked the topped ranked firm, can't blame me for them fucking up."
Assuming they are Apple shills, why do you think they are? What drives them? What factors created the Apple shill? What do they gain by being an Apple shill?

Is this supposed to be a difficult exercise? The reasons are rather obvious IMO -- they have a lot of social and technical capital in the Apple ecosystem.

Based on most of his articles, he writes about his experiences without generally using aggregate data to come to some conclusion about anything.

Just perusing the first page of his blog seems to indicate otherwise.
well I'm sold. I'm not sure if this is a recent thing but I remember the first time I saw this link I didn't see ruby so I just closed it without really digging. Perhaps that should go up there with your list of supported platforms.

Great work.
Where the blog post says "traffic router" you should read "big pools of load balancing servers" not Junipers and Ciscos and whatnot.

See also the posts in the google-appengine-downtime-notify group during the incident. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-a...
Compare these activities to the way in which the Surface's competition handles them...e.g typing, creating documents, video conferencing, and configuring email on an iPad.

The author's expectations were that the Surface would be as productive as a Windows laptop. Nobody expects an iPad to be as productive as a MacBook.
Of course this is their response, and I'm sure the response of a lot of other advertisers, too. Microsoft is deciding for the user (the option to disable appears in an obscure place with the installation of Windows 8, which I'm sure most people will miss).

If they were serious about this, they would just block those cookies by default. Otherwise it's pointless, and having Microsoft decide for the user makes the advertiser's decision to ignore it even easier.
I don't think anything you do can reach that audience. The only thing that MIGHT alter their perception is trying it themselves and even then it takes a lot.

But outside of that niche group I think your videos very well demonstrate the issues in a fairly indefensible way. The save issue in particular is the worst as you never treat people's files/work with that much disregard.
The lag in Word is more likely caused by an option that makes Office use accelerated graphics. I don't know why this option even exists - I've yet to see someone liking how typing in Office applications works with it being on...
Functional programming with Python
Write an email of < 30 words.

"I've asked the Gmail Meter folks to add a chart showing reply ratio on emails less than 30 words versus emails greater than 100 words. When I get that chart I will publish it here because I think that is single best secret to getting a reply from me."
Some context might be important here. The high schools mentioned in the article are primarily science high schools (the test is the SHSAT: Specialized High School Admissions Test), not general purpose super high schools. Other specialized high schools in the city focus on humanities, or performing arts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_high_schools_in_New...

I went to Stuyvesant and knew people in Bronx and Brooklyn Tech, humanities are not given nearly as much weight as math and science. That being said, the way the test is scored favors lopsided performance in one section: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0A1FFC385A...
How Sports Could Determine Our Next President
> Also, the power network is still very "former East - former West" built, which is not helping. We had 3 years ago a blackout of the West while the East (which includes the part with most of the windmills) was still up.

You're right that the former east has its "own" grid operator [1], but there is much more installed wind power in the north west[2].

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromnetzbetreiber#Netzbetreibe...
[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie#Deutschland
Unix isn't the most used software, but it is probably the best. I think the makers of unix bring with them a strong sense of pedigree, but also something of a expectation that it shares unix design principles. Not sure if it does this or not, but the baggage is there.
Reminded immediately of the Inclued tool for visualizing PHP include dependencies. Something like that for JavaScript would be very useful.

And of course now I'm wondering what I'd have to do get this working with code that targets a Web browser...
Customers are more pleased than ever with Supravizio BPM in 2012
As a way to guarantee constant innovation and excellence in its services, Venki Technology has aggregated a satisfaction questionnaire to its processes, sent by e-mail to users of the tool at the end of every assistance. Users voluntarily evaluate the response time, the quality of the solution presented and how friendly the assistant was.

Each item can be rated as excellent, good, regular, bad, or poor, and the results of the initiative have been being reason for celebration to Venki. According to the survey that consolidates data from the first semester, the approval rate for Supravizio is 96.3%. The recently disclosed number marks an improvement over the already superb one in 2011, when positive ratings were 95.1%.

“It's good to keep in mind we've had a 40% increase in our client base. That is, we can definitely say we were able to adapt to a higher quantity of assistance calls without compromising quality”, says Venki Technology CEO Wallace Oliveira.

In his analysis, this was made possible through the preparation for this rise in demand with upfront investment in infrastructure and human resources, allowing for an efficiency-oriented growth. Still according to the CEO, adapting the internal behavior to process-based management is another factor that ensures the satisfaction attested by the clients. As evidence of this concern, Oliveira mentions the creation of standardized and formal procedures of assistance and communication with clients, as well as the monitoring of deadlines and agreed upon activities and procedures of internal certification.

“Everything we deliver is largely tested internally. We also have managers responsible for generating and analyzing reports of periodical evaluation on the services we provide. It's an effort that applies on the company's routine what we offer our own clients, and it has been bringing us amazing results, as the numbers of the survey clearly demonstrate.”, assures Venki Technology CEO.
Wikipedia has the basic issues explained: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration
'As discussed, lowering the volume in software ... is accomplished by reducing bit depth.'

No, reducing the amplitude of a digital signal does not change its bit depth. If the amplitude of the digital signal is reduced, then a couple of bits on the MSB side will be constant. However, reducing the bit depth would make bits on the LSB side constant.

To state it differently, a lower bit depth increases the quantization levels and results in lower quality audio. Reducing the amplitude retains the same quantization level, and therefore has no reduction in audio quality (At least, not due to bit depth, it does change the SNR as you suggested)
Sorry about that! Looks like there was a hole in our Github auth flow if you don't have an email set. Should be fixed now. Or if it's something else, at least it should show you an error message.

Happy blogging!
The problem with Windows "apps" is that they are made inefficient and un-optimized by default, because they were targeted at much more powerful processors, and as processors became even more powerful, they didn't care about increasing the performance or at least keeping it at the previous level (and not slower).

Developers never really cared about netbooks, and these devices, either with ARM processors or with Atom, are only at that level. So most Windows apps will struggle on these machines, while most apps on iOS or Android will be a lot faster on the same processors, because their low-end target was something like a 600 Mhz ARM11 CPU.
Bitcoin mining perhaps? If I recall, after the initial hardware investment, electricity cost is the main variable to a successful mining operation. Reduce that cost to $0 and it suddenly becomes significantly more appealing...
Funny, I was contemplating something similar for the Canadian version.

May I ask where you got the source for the transcripts of C-SPAN from?
>As an example, you can browse the file system,

Yes, unlike the iPad you can access the filesystem OOTB.

>run desktop apps,

No, you can't. Office and (I think) Notepad and Paint are the only desktop apps you can run on the Surface with Windows RT.

>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.

You can't use an SD card as additional storage, but you can import pictures from a camera over USB or directly from an SD card, using the $30 camera connection kit. The USB port on the camera connection kit can be used for other purposes as well, for example MIDI keyboards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6Pwa3SbFFE

Not the same as having a USB port included, but the iPad is more capable than you make it out to be.
They do have an MX record present, so it's possible that they still use email for some legitimate purpose.
Bear in mind they've had the domain since 1994 apparently (according to a WHOIS lookup), that length of time makes it unlikely that it's purpose is illegitimate.
Strange uses of my time tracking iPhone app
From a source such as HN on something targeted like this I'd expect it to be much lower (<50%) the rate observed may be due to slow load times or landing page design or some other factor. There definitely seems to be some disconnect between expectations and what was found on the other side of the click.

Possibly someone that did a comparable launch on HN could give exact figures if they're willing to part with them then you could compare notes to see what works and what does not.

These can be tricky things to dig up, sometimes eye tracking is a solution to figure out where the disconnect is. There was a HN start-up working in this field (GazeHawk) but they've been acquired by facebook.
That's actually a problem academia should take on, but unfortunately that's not the direction computer science has taken.
Why not, ya know, use a laptop? There's a reason different form factors exist.
Brent the author here. I use Google's app-specific passwords and I've already disabled my Surface RT passwords when I boxed it back up this morning. I salute you though!
Ultimately it's not practical to use it, so even if it is easier to use after the great hump of the learning curve, it's still not good for real world applications, principally because of libraries, support and ubiquitousness . Certain languages reach terminal velocity, whereupon their real world usefulness goes up exponentially, and whether they are well designed or not the become practically necessary.
I think you mistook my question as criticism. To me this is the most interesting new possible form factor, but I revel in the ability to get my MBA out and set it on my knee and use it if I have to. I know I can use the Surface without the keyboard which is an interesting proposition but I want to know just how useful the keyboard is in all types of situations.
I installed Windows 8 on one of the first netbooks to appear (eee pc 1000h). The performance difference is not perceivable. If even at that level it's not, it will be even less on higher-end hardware. Even benchmarks show a 5% improvement at most in performance.

What Windows 8 does do, though, is trick you into thinking it's running faster, or "smoother". It uses animations to make those 0.5-1-second delays a lot more bearable. But the underlying performance is virtually the same.
Show HN: Baboon 0.1.1 available with a dummy demo project
TLDR: the secret is sending him emails of less than 30 words between 5 and 7am.

I wonder if that works for other notable people that get a lot of email?
There are two ways to sell, fixed price (difference to real price is in the end payed by comsumers) or trading it.
Lenovo Twist Review (Windows 8 Convertable)
Accountants are highly paid b/c they save companies money. If I charge $300/hr, but I save you ~$100k in taxes, it's a no brainer that actually makes you money. The same direct profitability cannot be said about programmers. At best it is indirect. That's what's called a better business model. You don't have to be an expert to understand you're getting a better product.

Additionally, programmers would do well for to adopt an accountants mindset toward explaining and justifying the reasoning for everything. My father's a tax acct/atty Who worked for the IRS for ~10y and now runs his own practice. I'm a "highly paid" programmer in Mountain View. I see a lot of parallels, but the difference in the business model is most glaring.

EDIT:

Perhaps a better word would have been "potential," as in potential revenue. The conclusion that spending $Xk on engineering will generate $Yk revenue is never guaranteed. This is what a typically tax accounting conversation sounds like: "I will save you $Xk in taxes for $Y." Conversely, engineers at best can predict that they will generate $Xk revenue while necessarily costing $Y. This is the distinction I was making.
I don't have an opinion either way, but this stands out to me:

> That's what everyone said about windows 7

Did people say that about Windows 7? I remember Vista was awful and nobody liked it and people were (naturally) apprehensive about Windows 7 prior to release but from what I recall -- granted my memory could be poor -- Windows 7 was well received at release and I don't know of anyone off hand that had problems with it but I can name quite a few that complained about Vista. Although I guess it could be argued that Windows 7 wasn't anything new, it was just Vista but how Vista should have been...
For now we're cheating and using a thing called TextGrabber (we were in a rush for the debates and couldn't play with more direct software solutions, but those absolutely exist). The box costs about $300 :: http://www.textgrabber.com/

If you wait I'm sure I or someone will add the ability to use a video stream as a source; there are tools out there that pull Closed Captions from video files and streams. For instance http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/

Heck, maybe you want to add that feature :)
all modern wind turbines have variable incidence blades meaning power regulation can happen on a second timescale.

I'm not exactly sure about the electrical machinery, but if that is sophisticated enough, it can be used in high accuracy fashion to control the generation so that the electeicity is produced in high quality.

You can think of the wind plant working as a giant flywheel. If there is a sudden gust, the spin speed increases and the extra speed is gradually harvested as energy. No sudden spikes. In theory the plants could be used to improve the frequency quality even more by also acting as motors.

If there is a real wind powef power electrical engineer around, feel free to chime in.
I experienced the same behaviour with Chromium 24 on openSUSE Tumbleweed x86_64.

Looks like a good start for a more linux-centered experience, doesn't it? ;)

[edit] Put in a smiley at the end of the second sentence to convey my less-than-serious take on the matter, which did not succeed to keep me from signing up... [/edit]
facebook being shady, that's so 2003->forever
Are the speakers really that bad as the reviews say?

I've read that the covers can be on the back of the tablet, while holding it like a magazine. Are the input keys disabled if you do that?
Is open source software a complementary good or a substitute good for developer labor?

I think the answer is that it tends to be a complementary good, driving demand for developer labor. Apache, mysql, ror, etc, let more of a company's software budget be paid to labor than would have happened with Netscape server, oracle or some costly 4gl language.

There are times when it is a plain substitute, especially when combined with that mechanic you speak of. See http://mikecr.it/ramblings/drupals-golden-handcuffs for more on that.

More on complementary and substitute goods: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Why would you have such an opinion ? I can turn the problem in my head a thousand times, i still can't see why.

I'd guess that Ben is basing this on decades of exposure to papers published, work done, and books published by Pike and Thompson. He then compares this to the many other programming language researchers with whom he has personal and professional familiarity, and offers his opinion on their relative abilities. He's not arguing 'in principle', he's stating his personal assessment of these particular individuals.
Yeah, some CSS and GTK+ interactions is definitely useful data to make conclusions about whether or not the Steam client or Source engine run well in Linux... (Neither of which (are likely to) use GTK+ anyway at that).
Of course they're competitors (although the Mozilla party line is "competition is better for everyone"), but I think the takeaway here is the mutual respect they have for each other. Building a browser is hard. And building a good browser (which IE 10 is, by the way) is a major endeavor. So I think each team has a pretty good idea of the level of achievement that comes with finally shipping.
>> The problem with Windows "apps" is that they are made inefficient and un-optimized by default

Very knowledgeable opinion sir. This is indeed true. Us as windows developers are required to add a sleep statement every few lines of code so as it not make it appear responsive.
This sounds like the "pirating software costs us TRILLIONS" false argument.

Most companies if they didn't have access to open-source software wouldn't pay for the 3-4 developers "it replaced". Just like people wouldn't buy 99.9% of the stuff if they couldn't download it.

open-source lets companies do more, not less.
>> while costing more than an iPad

and where did you get that from?
The Flop That Saved Microsoft
Mindroid - Painless threading for native code development in C++
“Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation; it is a secret that we are even having this conversation”

If this is true, it's practically begging for the blogger to research the law, and publish the whole conversation because FB has no right whatsoever to make such demand. I wouldn't call it scandalous, but it would certainly be a pretty dumb thing to say.

If I had to guess, I would imagine the conversation was slightly different. Perhaps a polite request to keep quiet. Who knows, Facebook is still a teenager in many respects so it's anybody's guess.

Edit: why would anyone downvote this comment? Curious.
Darpa funded Humanoid Robot Warriors
I hope he's changed his password. In one of the vids it's fairly easy to workout what he was typing to login.
one more problem is that mainland Denmark is well connected to Germany and not to Jylland, which is connected to Scandinavia. Scandinavia has mountains and operates th Nordpool market.

A HVDC network going from north african deserts to norwegian n mountains could solve some problems.
General Failure: How the American military rewards failure at the highest ranks
I certainly didn't mean to imply that they should have predicted this -- my reason for scoring the number of simultaneous issues is to indicate what a shitstorm this was.

That said, there are some genuine deep-rooted design flaws at work here, as others have pointed out, primarily Amazon's use of EBS for critical services in their own cloud.
Is he not performing the functions of a journalist? And if so, should we not encourage and admire someone's impulse to buck the system (without being destructive or unreasonable)? Why side with Goliath?
> at best it's indirect.

Sometimes everything you sell is made of software or information services. The value of programmers is not indirect in those cases.
This article only covers the elite "specialized" schools, which are not the only decent option in New York. There are also the "screened" schools, where admission is based on grades and attendence, not to mention the "audition" schools, which focus on performing arts and base admission on an audition. Failing to get into the very best schools is not the end of the world.

But the big problem is that the vast majority of children in New York City (and many other cities all over the world, of course) come from families where the parents are either functionally or completely illiterate, have no understanding of how to study, and/or simply do not value academic achievement. This is a big problem that you can't exactly solve by relaxing admissions standards -- it was tried with CUNY, and it resulted in a mass exodus of all the good students.

In China and the rest of East Asia, there is a centuries-old culture of studying your ass off to succeed in life. The article cites Confucianism etc. but it really derives more from the Chinese Imperial Examination, which if you passed, guaranteed you a good job. Good schools and good jobs in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea even now are usually only obtained by passing an exam. When they immigrate over here and they encounter a situation where they can benefit by passing an exam, they tend to excel.

By contrast, most of the other places that send lots of immigrants to New York (the American South, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, to name a few) don't have this cultural history at all. They don't know what to do, and the schools are not entirely prepared to teach them.
They're arguably less arbitrary than HTML; most of them are based in things that people have done/tend to do with plain text when they're trying to create a formatted document. That yields two benefits: the source document is inherently formatted -- transparently so, since even people who don't know what Markdown or the like is will be able to read it -- and creates something of a visual mnemonic for the formatting convention.

Not saying any one implementation is perfect, just that they have these nice properties.
I'm sure that comment means that developers do not put much effort into optimizing their Windows apps, not that they make them resource-intensive on purpose. No need to twist his words around.
The point is that you can get away with inefficient code on desktop Windows, which is invariably caused by your favourite application framework rather than glib developers (not) inserting sleep calls everywhere.
Bugginess and software weirdness aside, the thing that struck me as most awkward is the keyboard/touch interface paradigm. It required him floating his entire arm to reach out and touch specific dialogues. This seems like a huge sacrifice of touch precision and a strain on your arm. I predict that most people get a Bluetooth mouse for it and use it in either laptop mode or tablet mode - not a combination of both.