skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm think that Microsoft erred severely in making a Surface RT in addition to a Surface Pro.

Surface RT is too little. Why pay as much as an iPad and more than a Nexus 10 for a device with a last-generation screen and last-generation processor?

Surface Pro is too much. There is a segment of people who would want to run full-fleged desktop apps on a touch-screen tablet, but I'm convinced that the number of those people is vanishingly small. The apparent usefulness of being able to run classic desktop apps decreases when you realize that the apps that won't work with Windows RT are by definition the ones that haven't been updated to be usable on a touch screen. Moreover, with the touch cover requiring a flat surface to use the keyboard, the whole "laptop replacement" angle goes out the window in a lot of situations where a 10.6" laptop would be very desirable (e.g. train commutes).

It was a mistake from the beginning to have two lines. They should have focused on making one compelling product, instead of two severely compromised ones. Why are goodies like the 1080p screen bundled inextricably with the battery-destroying Ivy Bridge processor? Office is the key differentiator here, the "Windows ecosystem" is secondary. Surface should have been one device with a Clover Trail processor, 1080p screen, Office, and 8+ hours battery life. If Google can deliver the Nexus 10 at $400, Microsoft should have been able to deliver such a device at $600.

Unfortunately, all of the OEM's are copying Microsoft's RT/Pro dichotomy. The Windows RT devices have low-resolution screens and last-generation processors, while the Windows Pro devices have battery-sucking Ivy Bridge processors. It's a distinction that maybe made sense to some marketing geek, but one that's totally non-sensical as a practical matter.
Staples Announces In-Store 3D Printing Service
Messenger reveals radar like materials on mercury[LIVE]
.NET Champion perhaps? :)
That was about my thought process, accompanied by a whistle.
Just in case someone was thinking of doing this, Josh from Simple said: if someone produced checks with one of our customer's account numbers, our systems are set up to reject them.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844641
> 1366x768 display resolution

Bleh. What's so "ultra" about such a lousy resolution?
Yeah, I couldn't find it either. I'm still setting up Genius, so it may have been rolled into that.
I would like Apple to release a damn API to the iDevices so that some other motherfucker can innovate on this clusterfuck of an old codebase
I just downloaded this. I really like the new design, especially the new album view feature.

The most interesting update to me is iTunes Match: http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/
"Trading in snuff films" is not legal in all regions. But, even ignoring that, there's a difference.

Murder is rare. Films of actual murder are even rarer. Brutal snuff type films can be faked.

Child sexual abuse is not rare. Films and photographs of child sexual abuse are not that rare. Films and photographs of children being abused are hard to fake.

People who are caught with images of child sexual abuse tend to have large collections - tens of thousands of images. People need images to trade with other collectors. Researchers think that the collecting aspect drives creation of images of child sexual abuse.
Do we know how thickness will compare to the RT? From the photos, this looks kind of thick.
Sometimes when trying to make a point or advertise a product the simplest things are missed. In this ad "Try IE" is missing. The ad itself claims "progress" and "not as bad anymore"... but there's no call to action. I could make a fallible argument that the ad itself says IE is worse than all the other browsers - because it never says you should use IE... just that IE isn't so terrible.

It'd be a bad argument, but that's why I really don't like this ad - it's a (mostly) negative ad and emphasizes a negative point (how bad IE is perceived), which is not how you change people's thoughts. This video has many repetitions of IE SUCKS in it. If I were advertising a product, no matter what people thought of it, I wouldn't be flashing "my product sucks" all over the place for the majority of the commercial in order to make the last 5 seconds try and turn that on it's head.

You change preformed thoughts by repeating "my product is now great" over and over, not "my product isn't terrible anymore!"
You might want to mention that you modified the secondary locations in those snippets as well. Threw my guesses off, because I was trying to be clever. ;)
As others have said, I don't think it's possible. I think Microsoft could gain some trust by bundling Chrome and Firefox with Windows, and possibly even abandoning IE, but I think that's fairly unlikely.

[edit] their best bet is to make the browser 'go away' so you can't even tell when you're in IE. I think they're actually taking steps towards this with the 'metro' version of the browser in Windows 8.
Likin' the design, nice palette!
Sure, I don't want to get into a big argument here.

Even with the keyboard, it's still cheaper than what I paid for my macbook air and I get a touch screen.

To me that's better value, if you dont' agree, I'm fine with that:)
If Humble Bundles are not DRM free anymore I will not bother anymore. This is a disgrace to the brand they created.
"I decided not to introduce full refinement for Ruby 2.0."
I noticed the same. I think that's replace with the "Up Next" feature - basically letting you queue songs to an ad-hoc playlist as you go.
You can buy a Windows 8 tablet for $500:
http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...

This is closer to a Macbook Air competitor (with keyboard) in my opinion, that also has the ability to be a tablet and runs x86 applications. Given that, the price makes more sense.
I think a more reasonable analogy would be someone selling drugs in your stores parking lot. Your opening a private resource up for public use and someone is using that resource to break the law. However, I have no idea what the case law is and while I suspect the owners are left alone in the vast majority of cases, there may be some culpability.
You put a lot of effort to get it backwards.

> it's a tablet, without the regular complexities
> of 'tablet mode'

No, it is a table with added complexities of desktop mode.

> It runs the same stuff as your desktop, acts, smells, barks and looks just like your desktop

Except your desktop expects you to interact with keyboard and pointer device not with you touch. And there it all fails apart.

> if you want to use it like a crippled toy in the style of an iPad

The words you were looking for are "use it optimised for touch, as iPad".

> Microsoft were the first to seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience

And were seriously unsuccessful at it.

> Waiting with bated breath to see if Apple wholesale copies the Microsoft approach,
> toy-apps-as-start-button works wonderfully.

What's the logic behind that? Microsoft "seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience" and it fails.
Apple launches iPad with "crippled toy style" and it is wildly successful.
No somehow Apple should copy Microsoft's approach which failed?
Tor can be used for good and for bad. It's the very same problem that Cory Doctorow talks about in his lectures about the War on General Purpose Computing, and it's not an easy problem to solve.

I'm an admin on a social/gaming site (a MUD with appendant forum, blogs, and other community elements), and we have had to make a few decisions about Tor in the last couple of years.

Some background: the site is quite old, and we have historically encouraged users to sign up without needing to provide a unique ID such as email address. They _can_ provide one, but don't have to. In the last few years we have had the problem of occasional griefers log on and cause whatever social havoc they can.

Now, my personal feelings about Tor are generally quite positive, and I like the freedoms it provides people who are otherwise restricted by their ISPs or governments from accessing legitimate resources. Like many others have said, Tor is a tool that, while it can be used to do illegal things, is also used to provide a very useful service to people who need it to get on with things you and I take for granted.

Now, back to our griefers: We have a number of banning mechanisms based on IP or domain, and they tend to be successful because griefers usually get bored when they can't access the site for a couple of hours. However, because a tiny minority of griefers are more persistent, more technically adept, and figured they could use Tor to damage our community, we did a little bit of analysis and found that few if any legitimate users of our site came from Tor exit points, and we chose to block them. The alternative was to require a unique identity during the sign-up process, and frankly we wanted as few hurdles as possible to new users (anyone who knows the MUD community knows that it's in decline, and low-friction signups are pretty desirable). So we blacklist Tor exit points from our signup process.

The unfortunate fact is that some Tor users do bad things with the fantastic tool at their disposal, and end up spoiling it for the legitimate (and extremely valuable) use cases that make it such an amazing tool. Yet its very anonymity means that there is no easy way to allow one set of uses while disallowing others. This is a hard problem, and one I'm not smart enough to solve.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee.

I'm also a photographer in my spare time, and I'm looking forward to this device, in part because a friend of mine is an artist and she wanted me to evaluate it when it comes out to see if it's worth the money to her. The digitizer is definitely the biggest thing I want to test on the device. I'm hoping that the pen has pressure sensitivity, at least; and I'm hoping that it turns the screen off far enough from the screen that I can safely lift the pen a little bit before the touch screen turns back on again. Color accuracy will also be interesting; but, since it's an x86 device, I imagine we can install color correction software that will somewhat fix any issues there might be with that. (I have a very specific screen at home I use for color-accuracy. I'm very picky.)

I own a Surface RT, too, with a type cover and have experience using it for ... well, I got it the day it came out. First things first, I've worked with the device on my lap. I have pretty long legs, so the stand sits just fine in my lap; and, while I do prefer to have a hard surface underneath it, like a logitech or targus laptop stand, it's plenty usable in this situation. I use the machine on my lap at a friend's house on their futon all the time.

As for the "it's almost retina!" statement, the Surface Pro is going to be, for normal intents and purposes, retina at 17" away from your face(#). That's less than a normal laptop to face distance. For the Surface RT, I've personally find myself frequently having to raise the resolution of some webpages as they day goes on, because the text is too small to read. Using the same calculations as above, the Surface RT is "retina" at 23 inches.

(#) http://isthisretina.com/
If that price included a full version of Office I would definitely get it myself.

As priced, it's a no-brainer for the executive set who like to be seen with their iPads but get real work done on 5 pound, AD-joined, IT provisioned Dells. They already have volume licensed Office, and IT teams are going to make this a standard option for road-warriors and execs.

I think the Hacker News set doesn't understand what it's like to work at a non-tech Fortune 500 company. Microsoft's goal isn't to replace the iPad on teenagers' Christmas lists, it's to protect the highly lucrative corporate market from further iPad (and eventually Mac) penetration. On that measure, the Surface Pro is going to crush it.
Yes. Obviously a 3000 square foot house with a three car garage is a bit much for a single person, so I was assuming top 5% household income. Top 5% there is ~$200K/year.

I'd be interested to see which calculator and which figures randomdata was using. I have a hard time getting less than $750,000 for a "conservative" figure, assuming your debt isn't absurd and you save up for a $100K down payment (should be very manageable with $200K gross).
It feels like we're on totally separate universes.

I don't understand why you insist that shooting yourself in the foot is any argument. My goal is to convey a semantic to NOT have to read the code; obviously if we don't follow the same conventions it won't work.

I also don't understand how something being global is bad. A namespace is exactly that: global. It's like you would argue to not associate classes to constants because it makes them global. The issue comes when your class methods have side effects like Time.now or User.find because they make your tests harder to build. But that's not what I'm proposing.

Finally I understand the value proposition that you have regarding refactoring: if you change the implementation and keep the same interface then you don't need to touch the lines where the interface is used. But introducing a side effect rarely comes without parameters and because your lines look like SpamChecker.new(foo).spam? there is no way to introduce the new parameters without either changing the lines in question or using a global. As an example: using Akismet would require an API key. How do you introduce it without touching your interface ?
expensiveness: yes, including the touch cover it'd be priced exactly in-line with the 11.8" mba with the same storage options

polish: based on the design and build quality of the rt version i'd say it’s a pretty safe bet that the hardware will be plenty polished (that’s in my opinion of course; as a statement either way would be purely subjective..)

light-weight: 2.0lbs [1] vs. mba at 2.38lbs [2], so no..

windows 8: i'm assuming you consider that a negative (or at least are implying that it’s somehow inferior to osx), but i can’t think of any other system that’s as flexible in supporting various input methods and usage scenarios that would be made available on such a device

why: well i guess it depends on how you look at it. the way i see it is, unlike most tablets this is one that is also fully functional as a laptop/desktop (input methods, ports, connectivity, a fully-featured os that supports real multitasking and runs millions of applications) when you need it.. and, unlike most laptops/desktops, it’s also one that makes for an excellent tablet (touch input, pen/digitizer, increased portability, a fast/stable os with a nice touch-friendly interface)..

benchmarking against the mba i find it pretty hard to not see value there. and you may not need this (apparently most people do not need mba’s either by the way), but for some it makes for a pretty great value proposition as it really could replace both a tablet and a traditional pc.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...

[2] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html

edit: for some reason seeing those links next to one another made me laugh a bit; simplicity.
OpenLDAP's MDB is also in this space that is new enough that most people haven't heard of it's exitence.

http://www.symas.com/mdb/
Is there a point to this? Since the situation is vastly different in all the three places you mention, isn't this just empty relativism?
Wasn't Jeff Bezos a fairly senior and well-respected quant at D. E. Shaw just before founding Amazon? I would guess he would have had a fairly easy time raising money purely for capital purposes. Maybe he was strategically trying to get non-tech people in the book industry to invest and that was the root of the difficulty?
Try for example to reduce the number adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them with more simple, yet heartfelt language.

But... what if one has developed a rich vocabulary, and truly does feel those more complicated sentence structures and Five-dollar words from the heart? Is it better to dumb down my storytelling language so the listener can more rapidly assimilate the message, if by doing so, it is no longer my linguistic passion that ignites the tale?
For a production server I think that the opposite is a better _general_ advice - reduce the available swap, because if your server gets to a point to need it, the performance will suffer so much that your server will become completely unresponsive. Having less swap will allow the OOM to kill the run-away process and allow you to login and fix the problem instead of rebooting the server or waiting in vain for it to recover by itself.

edit: typo
No Major Discovery in Curiosity’s Mars Soil Sample
OK, we know language is good communication medium for dealing with humans, hopefully. Metaphor, drama, sensory-rich descriptions and so-forth are good tools for the language. These may or may not work well put together into a story.

And consider, a "hook" like "what X does to your brain" indeed combines interest-in-your-favorite-person-yourself and the crunchy authority of science. Those can work well till they get old and start to sound thin, formulaic and manipulative.

My next blog post will be: "What crude simplifications do to ours brains"
That's actually a pretty clever video.
There’s a very different set of publishers leading Google Play in revenue
Don't forget the ease of one-handed reading, and the ability to lay the e-reader down, e.g. to type out a passage. Neither of those are convenient at all with the books I read, unless I want to horribly mangle my book. Unlike GP, I prefer to keep my books pristine.
If only the author used this insight to look at the "what X does to our brains" framework that he organized his post with.
Holy! I STILL use this exact thing at home. My T41 handles DNS, DHCP, and print services. I just moved and it's still going strong... I never though to check the uptime before I left the old house, but it had the potential of 5+ years as we have had no major power outages.
> Like any framework, I would strongly suggest against forking the library and modifying the code directly.

The problem is that it's not a library, it's just scaffolding. There are no agreed standards on how to extend it. Most people include Bootstrap's CSS/JS files, then override on custom stylesheets. That's not viable at all.
Thq is getting desperate it seems. Really hoping they're able get their next wave of games out before they go under.
I'm still waiting for iTunes to have a normal queue that only plays the songs in it.
Water on Mercury
I definitely agree that working for free is a bad idea. But in the software industry we're currently enjoying a shortage of talent (well, that's either positive or negative depending on whether you're employee or employer) I kinda have one foot in the video/film production industry and it is so radically different to see people begging to work for free, having a food service job on the side, etc. While other graduates come out of the same 4-year education with a software degree and they're able to demand high salaries, signing bonuses, stock options, etc.
I love VLC for that too, whenever I see someone farting around with WMP trying to get something to play I always just link them to the VLC download page. Haven't found a problem that this hasn't solved yet.
Right, you may not even know that you have such media sitting in your browser's cache. All it takes is clicking on some link in a spam message, for example. Even if you immediately close it, the damage is done and you don't even know it.
What does the reality of what freedoms we actually enjoy have to do with what freedoms we should expect others to demand?

I may not have freedom of speech in the US, but I sure as hell can demand it. I expect to be given that freedom, even though I do not expect that will ever happen.
Did they make changes to iTunes Match at all? This is actually my favorite Apple service nobody knows about.
The new version is a ground up rewrite..
>By sequencing the abnormal DNA that a tumor releases into a person’s bloodstream.

I didn't say just ones that effect the blood. Getting to a blood supply is pretty bad too, makes it so the tumor can grow more. Many non-blood cancers can spread via the blood, which is also very bad.
I have to admit that I had something personal against IE:

When I stated as an entrepreneur, the banks forced me to use IE as using any other browser will be full of incompatibility bugs. They made them on purpose.

So they forced me to use a Windows machine when I worked with Unix. I had to spend a thousand dollars so I could use my ebank and read-write my customer's Office documents(because MS also made very hard for Office documents for being standardized).

When I created my site I had to spend a lot more money so it worked on the main browser: Explorer. It was kind of hard to understand why it was so difficult to make something that worked in all browsers, it was always Microsoft fault there.

I calculated that I doubled my expenses because of non expected stupid incompatibility bugs on my web site. The people that made it really cursed the Redmon company.

The moment I could jump ship and work without Windows or Explorer I experienced an Enlightenment, a liberation: Now I just don't hate them, I simply don't care because I know the only reason they are doing the right things is because they lost the monopoly in some areas and had been forced to react.

Good for them, I prefer "don't be evil" than "embrace, extent, and extinguish" for now.
Goes back at least as far as 1781:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-or-shoul...

Nouning verbs (like verbing nouns) is very common in English, to the extent it's often unclear which came first.
Hmm. As far as I can tell, not much about iTunes Match has been updated. It's been available since iOS 5 (and whatever the corresponding iTunes update was -- 10.x?)
Amusingly, the time police raided my stuff (well, they went after my roommate, and my stuff was in the living room and got taken along for the ride) -- they took the hard drives out of my media server. It was a software RAID-5 setup.

I imagine that they have the technology to rebuild the drives, but I have always smiled at the thought of some tech sitting there trying to rebuild this and wasting weeks of his time trying to figure out exactly how everything went. (It was actually a really terrible partitioning setup that was non-intuitive, with a "dead" partition that wasn't part of the RAID and used for reduced redundancy storage.)
Not so. AFAIK none of the major ebook retailers go out of their way to mention this, and they target their marketing towards consumers who are not savvy enough to know to ask. They will only inform you of the DRM when you run into one of the limitations it imposes.

EDIT: Actually, I should clarify. One ebook retailer does make this explicit — Google. But I wasn't counting them because they don't "own" a market segment and you'd probably be pretty savvy to be buying from them anyway.
There you have it, an excellent idea for a startup! Nothing drastically "disruptive" but a viable business nonetheless :)

Regarding the service, I have yet to find one like this myself.
About those European directives: one I am aware of is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area.

It will allow you to seamlessly use your Finnish bank account in Germany (well, 'seamlessly': everybody will get a gargantuan bank account number (Wikipedia gives an example from Greece with 2 letters and 23 digits). If you are still using pen and paper to transfer money, you'll be in a bit of a hassle)

There also is a directive that will forbid banks to have different tariffs for in-country and between-countries money transfers.
>I'm more worried about the precedent this sets. Is VLC going to need new cash injections every time Microsoft change the rules of the Windows Store, or release updates to Windows 8 that break the app? As I say, the next major release of Windows will undoubtedly break everything all over again.

The FUD is so strong I don't even know where to begin. It doesn't jive with common sense, history or the rumors regarding the future of Windows.