skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you here, but I don't think the "weak smart phone strategy" is necessarily by design. Honestly, I think they have a solid smart phone product, but were so late that they won't get the solid ecosystem of apps they need.

My issue with this article is that it forgets about the ugly side of Microsoft: delaying the sale of innovative new things to protect old profit centers in the enterprise market. Does anyone really believe that Microsoft CAN'T make editing hosted documents in Sharepoint as seamless and smooth as Google Docs? I truly believe that they have chosen to neuter a lot of their collaborative, web app based software to keep their old trusy desktop software (Office) profit center alive and kicking. They benefit from this, in the short term, in two ways: If the latest version of Office has new features, they sell the upgrades and make bank. Because it's desktop, they can say "you need Windows 8 (or whatever is latest and greatest) to run it Mrs. CIO." So then they make the OS sale too.
True, and I didn't mean to suggest that people should just use my application instead of this. I guess I was just pointing out that this to me is a simple feature (one that I think I added in less than a days time to our app) and they've turned it into a full-fledged product that they are charging for. As the commenter above stated, I guess once you have the rep of a 37signals you can charge for this sort of thing.
Now we know the format of the letters I'm waiting for anonymous to send a bunch of letters to every member of US legislature.
I actually think this could help their desktop OS become more popular, so I'm excited about it, especially if they don't intend to lock down their bootloaders or allow carriers or manufacturers to mess with it too much.

I just hope they don't start selling them in 2014 with obsolete technologies like the ARMv7 platform and OpenGL ES 2.0. They need to start with the 64 bit ARMv8 and OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU's. Better to start fresh, especially considering they're launching so late.
"I haven't seen much come out of it"

Are you mad?!

In fields such as machine learning and languages, papers by Microsoft Research _dominate_ top conference proceedings.
It depends.

Is your app CPU-bound? If so, then DCI probably isn't a great idea for you. In fact, building it in Ruby may not be the best idea.

But if your app is IO-bound (like most Rails apps), huge and it takes new developers weeks to get up to speed, then the gains from having a simple, modular code-base should save you developer-time (and hence salaries), which are much more expensive than CPUs.

Having said that, I tend to use SimpleDelegator instead of dynamically injecting stuff into objects.

EDIT: added 'ruby not being the best idea if CPU bound'
I would disagree with the not needing another distro comment. At the time, Linux was progressing fairly slowly. Ubuntu really picked up the ability for mainstream adoption by pushing the software and driver support further along at a quicker pace. They've put a lot of work into making Linux nice to use as a desktop OS, and it has pushed back into other distros as well. Anything they've done beyond that can be debated, but I have to give them credit on that front.

Ubuntu branded devices come after Ubuntu is ready to hit the brick-and-mortar market. System76 is one vendor selling Ubuntu-branded devices, and they're showing there is a market for it.
Tough to make invisible things intuitive, but you can always force a quick intro tutorial like webOS and Windows 8. Trouble is, hand your device to someone else and they might have no idea how to operate it.

Jolla is really pushing edge gestures in their interface, and in the demo videos that have floated around in the last couple months it looks like a joy to operate.
Ubuntu for phones
All of these conversations, even with special cases already marked on kitchen equipment, are all more complicated than the stupidly simple equivalents. Why in the world would you choose imperial over metric, unless you are just an old curmudgeon?

You can think the arguments for metric are weak (most of the world disagrees...), but the arguments against it are nonexistent.

(Dividing by two is just easy in a decimal numbering system as it is in a hybridized decimal system, so give me a break)
I am not quite sure if I buy this argument.

Microsoft certainly attempts to "productize", they simply fail on execution:

When the iPod was still "only" an MP3 player, Microsoft was pushing video capable PMPs through their PMC software.

Microsoft was betting on the tablet long before Apple.

Windows CE based Wizard style PDAs predate the Apple Newton, and Pocket PC was largely successful and shows Microsoft have been trying to get a Mobile OS into your pocket for nearly 20 years. It was largely Palm and Microsoft that built out this space.

The PocketPC iPaq even had a GSM jacket that allowed it to be used as a phone, making it a smartphone that predates even the earliest Ericsson/Nokia smartphones. Not to mention Windows Mobile which predates iOS and Android by many years.

Microsoft has been working on WebTV, Media Center and Xbox to get into your living room long before AppleTV or Google TV.

Microsoft has certainly attempted to productize on the ideas that come out of Microsoft Research and is almost always on the cutting edge of technology, and in many cases years ahead. The problem is that they don't have the same unified vision many other companies do, so when they execute they do so poorly: With incomplete products in an incoherent package.

Microsoft's problem isn't that they aren't making enough products, it is that they are sometimes too big and disorganized to make them good enough that people can see the underlying value.
1. These stats are worldwide. I believe the US phone market isn't very representative and most phone contracts sold last year did not come with lots of inclusive data.

2. These stats are just for mobile devices.
If you think this is going to de-focus Canonical's efforts you may be in a bit of denial on what their focus is.

Their focused effort is very clearly to be a player in a tablet/phone "post PC" space. Virtually everything they've done for the past 2 years points to this. If anything, this is proof of the focus of their efforts, you (like many of us) may just not like the path they've decided to go down.
The desktop market is more or less disappearing. On the business end of things, business has no issue paying the paltry sum of what windows + office costs.

I'm not sure what else they can do in the desktop space. IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop and both MS and Ubuntu have taken major missteps.

I also imagine Win8 SP1 will bring back some kind of classic mode. Not sure if Unity will ever be desktop-ified other than running a variant of ubuntu like Kubuntu.
Half a quart = two cups.
How to break all your New Year's Resolutions with Meetups
God? You like beauty and beast?

God says...
C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT

d say unto him, Didst not
thou, my lord, O king, swear unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly
Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne?
why then doth Adonijah reign? 1:14 Behold, while thou yet talkest
there with the king, I also will come in after thee, and confirm thy
words.

1:15 And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and the
king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the
king.

1:16 And Bathsheba bowed, and did obeisance unto th

----

dijon mustard?

Oh, bad eye sight -- like Jacob and Esau.
Oh great, another Ubuntu for %s with no shipping devices.

I really wish Canonical would partner with some OEM to actually produce some of these devices instead of just announcing they have software while expecting hardware OEMs to come running. I'd even be happy if they produced a firmware for use on the GN or N4.
Show HN - My Latest Side Project: WODWatcher
"now web applications are first class citizens on phones too" - wow. This made my day, my year.
I've seen a couple of these kinds of visualizations over the years. I think they are really fascinating... here's one that shows how long it will take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000:

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world

There are definitely still some very remote places on this planet.
This is a disaster for ZipCar customers. There are few industries that are as poorly run or that show as much contempt for their customers than the car rental industry. And Avis is a big part of the problem.
Probably all brands from Skyfall [slideshow]
I take atypical antipsychotics (quetiapine to be exact), the first couple of weeks is horrible, after that it's not _that_ bad, but you definitely don't want to take them if you can possibly avoid it.
As an example of this kind of very specific use case targeting:
http://basecamp.com/breeze/bookclub
It is amazing how much rage a story like this can produce in people who work in non-legal professions. The law-firms involved, of course, don't see it that way. This is just work for them-- although I can't fathom how they can sleep at night making a living by being what amounts to a parasite.
Bullshit, people still need to make things. Make emails, edit videos, edit photos, write documents. These aren't business class activities, but touch screens are insufficient for that function.

I don't see people lugging around a laptop anymore, but I easily see people plugging their phone into a display, throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on, and expecting a productivity environment from that device. The hardware has the power to do that now.

I can do that with my Android tablet. If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.
hey David,

I used to live in Brighton and moved to SF last June. I tried to bootstrap in the UK for about 2 yrs and then came out here to see if I could speed the process up. Unfortunately I got swallowed by my day job and that hasn't moved as fast as I hoped to, but that's a different story.

Preferring the bootstrapper way I haven't looked at all in VCs and the like, but I've looked extensively into SF and I'm involved with the local LSC group.

I'd be happy to share what I know and show you around SF if you'd like to - any way I can help I'm happy to - I wished someone had done something like that for me when I first moved here so this is a good chance for me to do that.
Good News For Entrepreneurs On Fiscal Cliff: R&D Tax Credit Extended
David Pollak and Dick Wall Discuss Barriers to Scala Adoption
But the question is why that would show that Apple is better off with DRM.
OS of Best Sellers in Laptop Computers

1 Chrome

2 OSX

3 Windows 7

4 OSX

5 Windows 7

6 Windows 8

7 Windows 8

8 Windows 8

9 Windows 7

10 Windows 8

11 Chrome
Okay, so bring on my half-baked "evil http" URI scheme. "ehttp://174.132.225.106,news.ycombinator.com/ would give you both the IP address and Host: header to send. Of course, you have to know good values for both fields or none of this matters.

I mostly meant this as something silly, but it turns out that people who do work on staging or dev versions of sites with certain hostname requirements might actually find it useful. I originally wrote about it here: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/17/nondns/
> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.
If you jog you can get there in 30 minutes. :)
Haha, fuck. I consistently read that as pint.
This is great. Has this approach to visualizing loops and structures been tried with general programs? Indentation and color coding seems to be the limit to the visual expressiveness in most IDEs because they tend to stay withing the format of plain text files.

I'd really like to see some more creative visuals like this for making program structure visible.
Here's their developer site: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/

From what it looks like, I'd need to redesign my apps from ground up using QML. They could have leveraged Android apps ecossystem, like Amazon, OUYA and even BB10 are doing. But chose not to. Out of nothing other than greed. And for that one reason, I predict dead on arrival.

Edit: Just had an Ubuntu community manager answer my question on their official g+ hangout. And confirmed that indeed. You'd have to redesign apps for it from scratch in QML. Nor are they planing to make Android apps compatible, nor easy to port in any way. Oh well, I'm certainly not gonna waste my time developing for yet another platform. Goodbye.
The thing that amazes me is that the map hasn't really changed if you are going by rail. My grandma lived in Colorado Springs and my mom and I used to drive there to see her for Thanksgiving because flights were too expensive. Leaving out of Chicago, it would take about 15 to 18 hours of driving to get to Colorado Springs. We would try to make the trip all at once and as a tall teen, it would be miserable being stuck in the passenger seat of a smaller two door convertible for so long. I asked my mom why don't we take the train and her response shocked me. Not only was the train from Chicago to Colorado Springs more expensive than flying, it was a 24 hour trip as well. If you look at the map from 1930, it it shows as about 1 day from Chicago to Denver/Colorado Springs area.
I've worked in a situation where I believed that what I was doing was fairly unethical. I wasn't sending out bogus legal threats, but I was doing development work for a company I consider flat-out evil.

I dealt with it by donating all the money I made during those hours to a relevant charity. It helped.
Robocop: superhero but not a savior
I was tired of having to check my feed reader multiple times per day to see if the coaches had posted the workout of the day at my crossfit gym. This frustration, coupled with the desire to learn about Heroku and Twilio, led to a fun project. It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here.
From London's business district, it is actually faster to get to London City Airport than St. Pancras station for the Eurostar.

This is made even more bizarre by the fact that St. Pancras where the Eurostar terminates is one of the only train stations in London which is located such that trains heading out need to "turn around" to get where they are going. You'd think the Eurostar would terminate south-east of London since that's where the train travels, but this one breaks the rules.

Oh, and EasyJet is probably cheaper than Eurostar to Paris if you don't have a lot of advance notice. I still love the trains, but you didn't pick the best example!
Web Developer Admits: Objective-C  HTML5
The linecount is of particular interest, as it ensures that Go has a decent amount of abstraction (almost as much as a scripting language?!) I think a performance comparison of memory/req/load ... anything, would be the next thing I would want to see. I liked this writeup better than the last one.
Firefox is already doing this on Android with the marketplace though. They are providing abstraction layers on the marketplace to let web apps take first class citizenry rolls on the current market leader. So it isn't a very persuasive argument for adoption.
Google, HelloFax, Expensify And Others Want You To Go Paperless In 2013
The future is 1975?
I did a 24 hour rail trip from Narvik, Norway to Gothenburg, Sweden. We changed trains in Boden, Sweden. It was ... long. The first few hours, over the mountains, was fantastic. Once we passed Kiruna it was forest. Lots and lots of forest. This was in summer, and there was overcast light almost the entire time. There was no feeling of progress during the journey.
How could they? This isn't Android, it's an entirely different OS. If it ran Android apps, it might as well be a custom launcher instead.
I was under 21 until 11/2. I got into Zipcar when I was 20. The tip is walking up to one of their on the street tables, getting into the registration process and then saying "Oh wait, I'm under 21!" They really want to make a sale so they say "Don't worry, I will put you under the UC Berkeley plan". The only restriction is you can only rent cars around the school they added you to. All of the cars around them are nice cars but you won't be getting the Mercedes or BMW.
This is already a problem with Chrome for iOS. It makes building apps in the browser difficult when swiping on the left and right edges triggers a "tab" switch.
The valuation is actually quite high and in the range of a lot of web companies. Zipcar is not new and has established revenues and profits. With this buyout the company has a 112 P/E, comparable to what Netflix is valued at (116 P/E).

The difference with purely web companies is Zipcar has a lot of fixed costs, if they want to expand to double the amount of users they will have a ton of capex to double the amount of vehicles (yes, you can probably squeeze a few more hours of usage into a car, but like planes there is a fixed number of hours any given vehicle can be generating you revenue per month). Web companies also see infrastructure costs dropping over time while Zipcar sees the opposite (after accounting for economies of scale, cars are not getting cheaper year after year).
Well, that, and it would be a monumental task to update historical metes & bounds measurements for most of the eastern states. Or so I assume.
At my first and only time renting a car, I was told that I was required by law to buy insurance covering damages. I did not know that I might have had insurance covering rentals elsewhere, even on credit card member benefits. I bought it for 20 something per day, and went outside to be presented a dented up car, whereupon I was told to not worry about dents since the car was already beat up.

On the plus side, I was also told the car only had a quarter tank full, but found a full tank. I didn't bother to report that, so I guess things evened out.
PrimeSense provided a low cost chip, but Microsoft:

- did the product design and put it into a friendly package (take apart a Kinect some day, they did some neat stuff in there)

- developed the body tracking algorithm (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/BodyPartRecognitio...).

- developed the microphone array, speech recognition algorithms

- provided developers the resources they needed to take advantage of the device

- applied it well to gaming and quickly brought it to market

- put the technology in the hands of millions, triggering even more innovation
Well...it looks like I'm not going to be sending you any patent infringement paperwork (whether it is legit or not)! Although, for somebody who has just snapped and is going to wreak physical vengeance, I wouldn't put a normal thought process behind it. Which means you may not be able to count on logically thinking and finding these people.
In Phobuuntu's defense, you just need to know that the app quickmenu is on the left, status bar on the top, previous thing on the right, and application options on the bottom.
Oof, noticed this too. I only use them in small sizes so it isn't worth the upgrade if it's just going to make them fuzzy and thinned-out. :/
Which is how in the US death penalty is executed. Even the pharmaceuticals use are, as far as I know, either the same or very similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental

Of course, while this is a very humane way to execute an euthanasia (either of animal or a human), talking about the least inhumane way to carry out an execution is somewhat ridiculous. The most humane way is to just not do it.

Also, it's totally off-topic.
That site isn't reliable for checking quotes. The only one I know of that tries to be comprehensive and accurate is Wikiquote, and according to it this line isn't attributable to Picasso: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Pablo_Picasso.
I took a stab at separating out the method dispatch costs from the cost of the #extend call here https://gist.github.com/4436640. I also tried making a call against an unmodified instance of a completely different class to demonstrate that the global method cache is indeed flushed in MRI by doing a runtime #extend on any object instance.

Subtracting the results of different runs like this is pretty questionable, though (the errors accumulate), so the above is to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Will Android apps be supported? Or must they be hacked? People want the best Google Maps not some second class html5 version.
Edge actions and gestures are great as shortcuts for advanced users. I'm starting to think that "no chrome" UIs will never be suitable for ordinary users. Especially because they, practically speaking, will never be standard.
I asked Paul Graham if I could use the Hacker News stack and he said it was okay since it is open source.
I don't know if there's a name for this style of display, but it's the same as the way JSON is depicted on its official site. http://www.json.org

Edit: It's called a Railroad Diagram.
How many Tesla Model S owners are out there?
I saw 3 (!) on the road this morning. Different colors too -- black, silver, and red.

I'm curious -- anyone out there have one already, and if so, how's it going? Also, have other people been spotting them with any regularity?
The cost of switching is non zero. I'm not bothered by metric, I can deal with it just fine. I'm just not bothered by standard units. I would never propose switching to standard from metric, but I just don't see what all the fuss is about.
I couldn't agree more. I got a year's membership for free, tried it once, never again.

For most times you want to use it (weekend), everyone else does too, so there's never a way to "spontaneously" use a ZipCar instead of something else (you have to reserve days in advance), and it's way more expensive than you'd been led to believe.

But secondly, I discovered hourly-based rentals just don't work. I was the idiot who returned my 4-hour rental an hour late, simply because of factors outside of my control (insanely long lines where I was, too much traffic coming back, but since I don't usually drive or go there, how was I supposed to know?). I felt horrible for the next customer who didn't have a car, had to pay a fine, and realized that life and traffic are just too unpredictable for reserved hourly rentals to make any sense at all.

If ZipCar had a huge fleet where everyone who wanted one in Manhattan on the weekend could get one, that would be great... but then it would be sitting unused during the week, and be way too expensive.
A $12,000 car will need to be maintained and over 10 years you're likely going to have a lot of repair costs. Zipcar builds that maintenance in.
With different words:

"I want to get this shit done." <-- This is an artifact of the mind, though it feels real. In Noting practice, you attempt to "note" the arising and passing of artifacts. So, what is this?

"I feel an impulse to get shit done." <-- Letting go of "getting shit done" and staying more to the present. In the present, you feel the impulse, you are not spraying your mind out into the imagined future/past where the shit has to be done.

"I feel an impulse to finish." <-- Letting go on what you specifically needs to get done.

"I feel an impulse." <-- Letting go of the notion of "finishing" something.

"I feel." <-- Letting go of the notion of automatically reacting to impulses.

"Feel." <-- Letting go of the notion of "self".

"..." <-- Mu.

"" <--

<--

"Oh shit, what hell was that?!?" <-- Everything that lives, will die, and eventually, new things are born. Just as "these things will pass", there new thoughts and emotions will arise. And so it goes.