skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Talent Arbitrage, or How I Find the Best People You Would Likely Miss
Actually, the problem with Microsoft is not their R&D. If they stop spending on R&D, Microsoft will still have the same set of problems.

It seems like their problem is that actually that they are not bold enough to push some of their research things to the market. Why do they need to copy Apple or Google in order to succeed in mobile market? Why not to do something bold and push it?
My previous link is a more general performance comparison across many languages. I realized upon re-reading that you were more interested in concurrency/scaling, this might be more what you are looking for: http://eric.themoritzfamily.com/websocket-demo-results-v2.ht...
To be clear, "Ubuntu" and "Ubuntu for Phones" are actually (very) different OSes. That link is for regular Ubuntu.
I like MonoTouch so far but I must admit these are all valid points. There are more downsides Xamarin doesn't like to advertise, like problems with AOT compiler you can't anticipate until they bite you in the ass, the-GC-won't-collect-some-stuff problems that basically force you to always dispose native objects manually, and horribly buggy IDE that MonoDevelop is.
"I'm a Java dev, flipping back and forth between IntelliJ and Eclipse. Using Eclipse since the pre-1.0 alpha, I still find it more comfortable. But IntelliJ's rate of improvement has prompted me to use it more."

I think you get it really backwards... Back in the days IntelliJ was just soooo much more better than Eclipse it wasn't even funny to compare the two. It was just plain sad.

But... As a lot people predicted, Eclipse being Open Source and IBM having put some of its weight behind it, Eclipse started to get quite good.

Nowadays Eclipse as nearly caught up and it's just a matter of time before Open Source, once again, shall win.

It hasn't prevented me from buying IntelliJ at 70% during their doomsday sales.

Anyway the "rate of improvement" you're talking about is definitely on Eclipse's side (and this come from some using IntelliJ since version 3 or 4, don't remember), not on IntelliJ.

IntelliJ is still banking on its slight edge, but as time passes by that edge is eroding more and more...
Sorry, but you're really attacking a straw man here.

Neither C# itself nor the OP's article sell C# as being a prime language for functional, dynamic, or systems programming. Rather, it has inherited some convenient little bits of each paradigm to make the language that much nicer to write.

For example, don't want to redeclare that "List<List<LongTypeName>>" you're copying over because it has a scope of 2 lines? Just dynamically type it by calling it a "var" and be done with it. Boom: Cleaner code and zero performance hit because the compiler infers the type such that the resulting IL is identical at runtime.

Sure, given features can be misused to produce ugly or "unsatisfying" code, but that's true of any language and is ultimately the programmer's fault. Just because said features are provided, doesn't mean you need to use them. You should ultimately be using the right tool for the job, after all. C# gives you the power of having a wider choice of tools, and I love it.
It would be an impossible task to do that for all phones. But the community can make ROM's for different phones like they do it for Android.
Actually, the problem with Microsoft is not their R&D. If they stop spending on R&D, Microsoft will still have the same set of problems.
Killing R&D will not help anything.

It seems like their problem is that actually that they are not bold enough to push some of their research ideas and prototypes to the market. Why do they need to copy Apple or Google in order to succeed in mobile market? Why not to do something bold and push it?
"I haven't done much of X" != "I don't know X".

Keep up the good work, Einstein.
The URL could simply include the regexp encoded in a path component or query string. No need for a URL database.
My dream too, like this http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-co...
It's open sourced - https://github.com/tburch/jsonblob.

It's running on a single Heroku dyno with the free MongoHq service, so at some point I'll have to figure out what to do when there's more than 512MB of documents stored, but for now it's running indefinitely.
'Tsunami bomb' tested off New Zealand coast
Originally, this place was "Startup News," but it got changed to "Hacker News" to broaden its scope. That said, there's always a difference between 'in theory' and 'in practice,' and so I sorta agree and disagree with you at the same time.

I would like to see it more and more away from Zuckerberg and more and more towards old school, so I'm attempting to be the change I want to see in the world. ;)
What do we cut spending on? There's never any cost-benefit analysis of what we stand to gain by cutting what's left to cut.

It's frustrating, because the right wants a nice, happy round number to match their nice happy round-number of a tax rate they also think they should have to match the nice happy round-number of what's too big for a deficit.

Meanwhile, there's a society that, by definition of "government" is going to be impacted by what government does or doesn't do---regardless of whatever Randian fantasies one may have.
Ha interesting. Didn't know abou that expiration.
I look forward to reading http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1795... this one about Halo combat skill development:

Using these ratings from 7 months of games from over 3 million players, we look at how play intensity, breaks in play, skill change over time, and other titles affect skill.
Yes. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=play... after a few minutes/seconds the search interface is demoed, that searches for films, music and books, presumably from Amazon, though that's not specified.
Programming is hard. Likely they didn't have a test for every possible date.
I agree completely about FOSS. But, based on my experience porting CyanogenMod to my old phone, things are not as compartmentalized as you would hope. For example, the user initiating a call to 911 and control of audio is not managed by the radio chip.

The radio is not completely isolated. I have broken ROMs such that dialing 911 does not work. The phone I spent time hacking on had the radio attached over USB, and there were all sorts of magic AT chats that were managed by some proprietary library. Also, firmware on the radio was loaded into the radio by the OS. Anyway, my point is these things are not obviously separable, particularly at the holistic level of what's required by laws and regulations.
Mostly because it looks like Java and on the first glance also shares Java's mostly static type system (which is not strictly true).

The gist of it is: you can send arbitrary messages in Smalltalk (and ObjC) and the object itself deals with them somehow (with most of that being implemented by runtime anyway, but that is different issue). In C# you call methods defined by interface.

Also, you cannot modify arbitrary parts of standard library and runtime, but that is probably for the better (doing that is pretty common in ST world).
"It's one search to rule them all"...
it's actually forever free---they say only 6 months, but the expiration is non-existent. I've been using mine for over 4 years!
If all the right were Ron Paul drones :)
> I put about as much effort into my critique as the original article's author did in arguing for C#'s superiority.

Not really. He stated an actual fact: Proper garbage collection allows for simpler memory management than retain counting. I agree that he didn't do enough to illustrate this, but he did go further than just "I like this thing." It is indeed true that there are a number of awkward situations where you can end up with immortalized objects with retain counting that would not have been so under garbage collection (see for example the "__block id uglyHack = self" idiom in Objective-C).

> 70% code reuse across iOS and Android (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998661) is hardly what I'd call "portable". Does the Bash shell do better than 70% code reuse across Linux / BSD / etc? I certainly hope it does.

I would rather rewrite 30% of my code than 100%. If you want to say it's imperfect and could be better, that's fine, but dismissing it entirely seems unreasonable to me.
From the link above describing Ubuntu for Android: "Ubuntu and Android share the same kernel. When docked, the Ubuntu OS boots and runs concurrently with Android. This allows both mobile and desktop functionality to co-exist in different runtimes."
if we start with the "ban" as the idea it will take another year atleast to bring it to vote, and democrats are not majority, so the day we start announcing lot more people will start buying everything of the shelf. NRA knows how to twist people to listen to their own version of the truth.

even when the ban if it comes it would be for "manufacturing and sales of guns" just like 18th amendment for banning alcohol, it would do nothing to keep the existing guns in safety.

so my thinking is safety of the guns by owners without involving guns and and restrictions of guns in public places by involving people, organisations and if needed the government, this would be a compromise which republicans and democrats can agree on.
You are right about Microsoft Research (MSR) but not about IBM Research. In fact, MSR is the only true academic-style research lab left in the world; all others either disbanded or became more product-focused. It will be interesting to see how long the MSR model survives. Will be great to hear the views of an MSRian on this.
It's not about having people with the same name, or identifying a person uniquely for the purposes of a program. It's about people changing their legal birth name in the future to a unique choice that means something to them so that they can have a single identity across all social networks or communities. They will want to do this because social networks and communities will be so ingrained into every day life, so much so that their online identity will have more meaning to that person than their legal birth name.
But why not just use /64 or /32 for everything?

3/32" vs 4/32" is win-win compared to 3/32" vs 1/8" or .09375" vs .125"
> The downside of that is that at any given time Tornado can process only one HTTP request. If that processing takes a long time, it blocks all other requests.

What? The whole point of an async framework is to service multiple HTTP requests concurrently.
Obligatory link to the Sequelitis Mega Man UX video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM&feature=playe...

The article hit the nail on the head: the best walkthrough is the one that it nearly invisible to the end-user, yet still accomplishes its goal of progressively introducing a UI to them in a long-lasting way.
Connecticut town drive will collect and destroy violent video games
>What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings

Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data storage.

Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.
Those are both focused exclusively on the web though. It would be cool to have something like those but for a wider community; there's more to programming than HTML/CSS/JS.
Dronenet: The next big thing
>f you have a locked bootloader sometimes you do , or at least a way to work around it.

You still don't need their blessing, you just need to unlock it. It's your phone, not theirs. Period.

>I don't get the "put up or shut up" part.

It means I can go to their website, click "Get Ubuntu", and download it for my phone. Until it shows up here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download

It's vaporware.
That's too bad for them...
I find it fascinating that it doesn't work between 1/1/13 and 1/6/13 but claims it will start working on 1/7/13. What is different about the 7th than the 6th?
The thing is like Mozilla, they piggy-back on Android for Linux kernel and drivers on hardware.

A Mozilla engineer told me that without Android (and consequently Linux kernel and drivers availability) they could never have pulled it.
StackOverflow Redesigned
Hitler had absolutely no chance of long-term victory against UK and USSR, and Swiss also saved untold amounts of people who otherwise would have nowhere to go. They turned away plenty of refugees (IMO needlessly), but they saved plenty who otherwise would have no hope. And while they could make a stand, ultimately they wouldn't make that much on an offensive. Seriously, they were surrounded, the most they could do was make transport expensive. Which they did anyway, just without sacrificing a lot of people for some pompous reasons.

This is not to say all they did was right, and the fact that they still keep making and selling weapons is not exactly great as well, and a lot of Swiss were unhappy with sheltering any refugees, but the general idea of keeping neutrality and protecting as much as they could — which was, basically, people already there — was good. Remember, also, that Switzerland helped many troubled countries in later years.
Let's be clear here. The deal means the bush era tax cuts remain for most people (a 3 percentage point reduction for most brackets), while we lose a temporary payroll tax for 2%: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-28/breaking-down-the-c...

If I understand correctly, that means taxes should still be about 1% lower than they were during Clinton.

I love how every time a temporary tax cut expires, we call it a "tax hike." I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.
It seems likely that the fact that this is the 1st of the year is related. This should be an obvious edge condition for testing.
Ubuntu for smartphones, tablets overview
>Its ridiculous to single out the Swiss as shameful in WW2, looking at norms 70 years ago would make all people "shameful" in some way.

Are you actually equating all acts of 'shamefulness' during the 30s/40s at the same level? Your statement is tantamount to equating the actions of the allies with the axis, which is obviously ludicrous. The Swiss acted uncharacteristically selfishly and shamefully, even when compared to the record of the US. There's no need to jump to some half-baked defense of the Swiss, they deserve every bit of criticism leveled at them for their actions during WW2.
For those reading this outside of the USA, this grandparent and parent poster are why this country suffers from backbiting and lack of any sort of progressive reform, like basic health. This view exists from the very bottom to the very top of the socio-economic ladder.

Being a citizen of Indiana, I am embarrassed to have such people at the helm in this country. It is all [pro-democrat, hate republican] or [pro-republican, hate democrat] with no room for even discussion of what works or not. It's all platform based demagoguery.
It seems significant that this is exactly one week later.
Canonical must have at least one ROM that they use for their own testing. Why won't they even release that?
You win for best HN username. And thanks for the kind words.
Kind of makes me wish that we had a sort of local server appliance that was zero administration but provided a safe place for all of our documents at "home".
i was impressed by peopleware, maybe because it agreed with my prejudices. i doubt it's going to help you with interviews as it's more about culture, but it's a fairly slim book that's worth the read (more than mythical man month, imho).
I feel sixth sense device concept: http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potenti...
You'll certainly be able to install it on your phone, but Ubuntu can't reasonably count on that only to get adoption. If manufacturers don't ship Ubuntu phones, the OS is doomed.
yeah he got too excited, if it was $20t Boeing and Lockheed Martins would be building it :)

what I would like to point out is the cost to US economy

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/shootings-costing-u...
Cartoon about Relationships
Really cool. Any chance you could add an export-as-<some vector graphics format> option?
The article makes it sound like the bill explicitly raises taxes on 77% of households. This would be false. The bill simply does not extend the temporary tax holiday that was signed into law at the end of 2010. The payroll tax rate goes back to the rate we've had since 1990.
Certainly. It's what you do after that's problematic.
RE: GC vs reference counting, I've found that writing code using ARC feels a lot like writing code using GC - 95% of the time, I never notice it. Still, I'd prefer to not have the overhead of GC.

> I would rather rewrite 30% of my code than 100%.

I agree with you on this. I'm not dismissing it - in my original post, I said the focus of the original article should have been the potential for reuse across platforms - but it was glossed over in a disappointing 3 sentences.
I feel like I found what you are looking for from Coderwall's blogs, they tend to be short interesting snippets by language and sorted by popularity.

https://coderwall.com/n/python
https://coderwall.com/n/ruby
https://coderwall.com/n/haskell
Free Premium Files For January 2013
Schneier's Cryptography Engineering (previous ed. was called Practical Cryptography) would be a far more useful crypto book than Applied Cryptography. I believe Schneier himself even recommends skipping his seminal book.
Except we will still need stateful firewalls in consumer devices with ipv6, and that's just as hard to get right as NAT.
Thank you! We want Quivee to be more accessible and easier to use, but you're right -- they should know what it is first, and those tips can definitely help.
I believe video chats have been replaced with hangouts (same icon launches a hangout instead of video chat).

I got a prompt asking me to do this the first time when the functionality was enabled, and now all my video chats are hangouts. Makes sense to me, as it's essentially the same functionality + the ability to invite multiple people to the video chat + include additional apps that add to the video chat functionality (live editing Google Docs, for example).

I have to say, I was pretty disappointed with the actual quality of audio calls (not a huge fan of video chatting with friends) when compared to Skype. I've tried many times over the past few years, but Skype still kicks Google's ass in terms of call quality. Is mine an exception to the general rule, or is this true for most people?
I happen to like Eric Barker's work, so I'm going to defend it. Judging by your response, you just read the subheadings and not the supporting text that accompanied them. If you did, you'd see links to the research that supports these "generic" pieces of advice.

It's not enough to know that exercising and laughter will improve your health, but you need to know why--the stuff that Barker puts on his site or on Wired is research-based. It isn't just garbage from link bait sites like pickthebrain.com.
If 7 Out of 10 Working Americans Got Fired Tomorrow, What Would They All Do?
This is interesting because most people like me have assumed that the next great debate about guns and technology would be about 3D printing, but it's interesting to see that some people still think there's a debate to be had about whether artistic depictions of guns should be allowed.
Actually, it should be sent to their re-election campaign committees; legislators themselves are considered members of the government, and would not be considered businesses in their own right. Whereas their campaign comittees are heavily regulated businesses that get lots of financial scrutiny and are very short of cash usually.

Although that is a dangerous precedent to set; once you start using that sort of tactic, it will become yet another way for big business to lock out candidates they don't like and would have an overall chilling effect on participation in the political process.
very nice! makes me wonder, would it be helpful to have a natural english style language to express regular expressions in? Since the diagrams say "one of" and things like that, it makes it so much clearer. Maybe a library that let you say the same things would help too, since I think the ultra-hieroglyphics are part of what makes regex so confusing. Nothing very ambitious, just changing dots and stars and weird parentheticals to english words so when you read a regular expression, it reads more like the output of this site, which is nice.
mini review by the Verge : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXWnMTm7We8
That's a bit of a strawman, since I said nothing about the securing of property. As you are undoubtedly aware, government does not allow a choice in this, but you're likely taking a position that it must be this way. You're also taking the rather weak stance that existing precedent doesn't allow for any other way. That kind of thinking serves governments well (they don't think well outside of the box), but not private individuals and groups.
Read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995559 (this was posted by me in response to someone else 7 hours before your comment, but it directly addresses your argument: concentrating on anything but iPhone 4 is a very "I have a lot of both money and knowledge about technology"-focussed way of approaching this problem that loses touch with the actual demographics that are being discussed when you look at piracy...)
So what was in the SDK that PrimeSense was packaging with their reference design before the launch of the Kinect?

http://pr.cs.cornell.edu/humanactivities/data/NITE.pdf
If you're a landlord, you pay taxes on income and property. There's no reason to think that being subjected to taxation in one form exempts you from all others.
It's incredible that people are downvoting you for pointing out a legitimate problem with his post. But hey, I guess even supposedly-intelligent HN readers cheer-lead in debates.
Some of the code was certainly written before those features was available, especially some C# 4 features. I'm sure someone might look at my code someday and wonder why I didn't use async and await. I'm talking about code written today though.
Amazon is the main channel for Chromebooks but not Macbooks. Amazon may not be a great sample of the laptop market percentage. I see way more Apple laptops than Chromebooks day to day. It'd be great if that changed in the future (and perhaps it will after this holiday shopping season via your link).
The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me. It's a bit linkbaity, yes. The payroll tax holiday was a stimulus measure that was never meant to be permanent, yes. We should not compound the long term issues with social security by chronically underfunding it, yes.

It's a hike and one I'm perfectly happy to live with. As a commenter at metafilter put it:

Well, it's that or more ice floes to put the old folk on, and the ice industry isn't making any production gains either.