skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now we have git, MVC 4 (now open source) and better unit testing support. Makes me think these are the results of some kind of long fought battle by a small group of progressives inside Microsoft.

Of course, that's just my imagination.
Are Medium and Quora Just the Rebirth of Content Farms?
Beta testing a Social Network for Programmers
Find cofounders with the expertise and contacts you need, or at the very least advisors. There's a lot of legal complexity, you'll need to get FSA approval and do things like setup ringed-off accounts to hold client money.

Depending on your definition of small you might also need to figure out ways to reduce transactions fees which may mean taking on risk yourself, in which case you'll need to ensure you have suitable risk expertise on your team.

One way to make things easier might be to whitelabel an existing brokerage service as a step up to being a full broker.
In the next few years, websites will no longer have same messages and content for everyone, but rather completely personalized in terms of the content (and even layout and design) served completely through implicit personalization powering implicit discovery based on what I like and prefer.

Not being a rich man, I'd put down $100 on a carefully worded bet that this is not broadly true at the end of 2016.

My experience is that, broadly speaking, people are relying upon strong editorial brands and direction more than ever, rather than automated curation and personalization. Many of these brands are social or curation-based (Gruber, Techmeme, the swell of e-mail newsletters, Hacker News even) but full on personalization has failed (and, IMHO, will continue to fail) to take off at the publication level.

It's not as if we've lacked for algorithms, news sources, or the technology to do this, and both companies and people have kept coming along with the personalization promise. While it appeals to my geekier side, I'm starting to think these promises are just sales pitches from people with algorithms to sell rather than a solid grip on both the media and what readers actually want.

Like RSS, a certain audience - mostly the more technically inclined - will stick with it, but I don't see a big swing into all-personalization-all-the-time working out long term in the mass market. But now I've said it out loud, I'm prepared to be linked back to this in several years when I'm proven wrong ;-)
Activists Flood Government With FOIA Requests in honor of Aaron Swartz
a great example of a solution in search of a problem. maybe i'll be eating my words but everything app.net does continues to scream that they are living in a bubble where many people actually care about things like data portability and privacy. few people do. they can carve out a niche perhaps but most things i hear about app.net is how they are going to take over the world. i'm not seeing it.
I agree that app.net is an awkward name, but you're wrong about it not being about apps: It's developed explicitly as a platform on top of which apps can be built. Hence the File API.

The Twitter-like interface you see when going to the site is Alpha, an app built on top of the app.net services. Similarly there are apps like Patter which go in other directions, creating an IRC-like environment.
Human cognitive illusions are powerful. It is by no means guaranteed that any number of human brains attempting to grapple with a problem will arrive at a correct answer. Democratic and scientific processes of sharing information and authority help a great deal, but one commonality all human beings have is fallibility, and crowd-sourcing more fallible brains doesn't eliminate that instrumental problem in truth-seeking.

(That said, I do appreciate the disagreement I often receive from other participants on HN as a reality check on my own thinking.)
When I was a kid in small-town Ontario, buying tax-free cigarettes was a lot like buying marijuana - you went to the guy who was known to sell them, who was usually hanging around the high school, and he hooked you up.

In my day the cigarettes were name brands, sold to low-tax American states and then smuggled back into Canada through Indian reservations - you couldn't tell you were smoking smuggled cigarettes by looking at the butts. Now Indian reservations manufacture their own untaxed cigarettes - which is completely legal, when bought and smoked on the reservation. However, they're also illegally sold off the reservation.

In Ontario at least, it's against the law to buy these cigarettes off the reservation. The penalty is a fine. Enforcement, for the individual buyers, is pretty much non-existent.
Love that Twilio is listed. Their Support Team is great!
What did you spend your $1500 on?
Well done, MS! Hope this will be better than Xcode integration. Next step would be to add OpenGL ES support for Windowz Phone.
How is this application getting the locations of the files, Google search parameters?
Yep, you can do WoT with X.509 if you write the semantics from scratch, and you can also do a CA approach with OpenPGP.

The thing is, for years no-one has stepped in and actually gone through the pesky little details of implementing all those semantics for rubygems via X.509 even though it's come up repeatedly. But maybe someday some expert will come along and fix things.

If you actually read the rubygems documentation on signing gems, it's pretty much "Okay generate your own self-signed key, then sign it with your self-signed key." That leaves a lot to be desired vs best practices. There isn't even an attempt to describe how you get your self-signed keys to users.

I just think leveraging the existing OpenPGP semantics, ecosystem, and battle-hardened gnupg codebase, is a lot easier than implementing an entire system from scratch on X.509 just because openssl is already installed everywhere and ruby has better bindings and gnupg is not and does not.

I'm just trying to take the approach you usually preach: Don't roll your own crypto code and leave the real work to the pros, and it seems like gpg offers a lower path of resistance.
of those brains, how many are actually analyzing the problem, vs just regurgitating information posed by someone else?
Ignoring all of the other facets of app.net, because it's a paid service this almost by definition limits it's virality. I can't imagine that Vine or Instagram would have taken off if it required a subscription of $36/year or $5/month.

Secondly, what is the benefit to the app developers themselves? Platform lock-in is one of the strongest tools that they have to wield, why would they willing give that up to avoid paying for an S3 bucket?
Well, I guess our experiences differ. Personally, I find it impractical to push many-terabyte files around, when, for a few bucks, I can effectively regenerate them in a matter of minutes.
The proof will be in the apps.
Well, I'm guilty of shooting my mouth off about something I haven't revisited recently, so perhaps things are better these days. I haven't used source control integration with VS2010 or VS2012. Sometimes, when I find something to suck, I still revisit it every now and again, just in case it's since improved. The Visual Studio source control integration experience was just so reliably, hellishly awful that I never saw the need.

(The experience could well be better if you have a distributed system. Much of the plugins' flakiness seemed to be come from having to talk to a server (downtime or network connectivity problems always caused issues), and from the maintenance of accurate check in/check out information - both non-issues with a distributed system.)
Seriously those who know how to use it, don't use the ribbon, or the old toolbar. Those who don't know how to use it, whinge.

Double click a ribbon tab to hide and use the keyboard.

I will say that I actually had word 97 and word 2010 side by side a few months back with toolbars off and its not all that different. Makes me wonder what I've been paying for all these years. Same with the excel versions.
Using OpenPGP is a bad idea here. All the mainstream rubies have access to high-quality X.509 in their mainline distros without a third-party gem.

Both OpenPGP and X.509 are going to require a little of fiddley semantic details that will take time to hash out. The bottleneck here isn't the technology.

I like, and routinely recommend, OpenPGP for solving app crypto problems. X.509 makes a lot more sense here.
Lose a Battle, Win the War
Exactly. Johnny Ives is the man to watch.
That is an excellent question. Here is a quick answer off the top of my head.

As mentioned, the foundation for maintaining the culture was laid far in advance. The tight relationships, respect/trust for each other, challenging and fun environment, were all things that we created from the beginning of the company.

If we hadn't of established those things I think everything would have fallen apart.

That being said, I think there are things you can do during and right after layoffs to ensure you don't damage your culture.

1. Make the layoffs swift, fair, and respectful. The longer you drag it out, the more damage you do.

2. Immediately after the layoffs get the group that remains together to explain what has happened. Reassure that there will be no more immediate layoffs to quell any fears.

3. Each manager after the group announcement should meet with their team members individually to give everyone to comment or ask questions they weren't comfortable with in front of the group

4. Focus on multiple social team events in the immediate couple weeks after. It is important that whoever is left gets use to the new smaller group.

5. Present a new plan of action as soon as possible to get focus and buy-in. More importantly show that you won't be repeating the same stuff that doesn't work.

6. Find and celebrate some "quick wins"

The goals of all your actions during and after layoffs is to build confidence in the leadership and team that is left.

To answer your second question, to my knowledge people stayed friends with those that got laid off. I still talk to many of them myself.

I hope this helps.
> What's interesting now is that Apple, BlackBerry and Microsoft now offer integrated hardware/software platforms. It's become similar to the way the console market has been between Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

You forgot Google. They have Motorola, and they are going to be highly integrated with Android, no matter what they say in public.

Also Samsung has gotten pretty integrated with Android, too. Sure they add the latest "Android features", but on their own time, and it's not the main priority for them. They'd rather ship with an older version but filled with their own apps, features and technologies. It's not that different from Amazon actually, except that they still have to adopt some standards set by Google to make sure they don't fragment to ecosystem too much, but they also get the benefit of access to the Play Store and the Android community (Amazon doesn't appeal to the Android community as much anymore).
Mobile revenue shines as Facebook’s earnings beat Wall Street estimates
>> Take away those last three benchmarks... <<

What if we are selective with the evidence a different way, what if we take away k-nucleotide and pi-digits and reverse-complement :-)

>> My perl port of fasta.rb <<

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php#contribute
Hi there, just wanted to let you know I changed the way toggling the sidebar works and I'd appreciate any feedback you have time to give? http://toogl.es/#/view/oFR4L6GegXA is an example link.
Does Mobile Web Performance Still Matter?
Evolution of childhood: Prolonged development helped Homo sapiens succeed
One day self-crowdfunding will be as easy as hosting a blog. Not yet, but this is a good step towards that direction. I certainly wouldn't mind it if in 10 years crowdfunding is what powers the internet.
Hi again, just wanted to let you know I changed the way toggling the sidebar works like you mentioned and I'd appreciate any feedback you have time to give? http://toogl.es/#/view/oFR4L6GegXA is an example link.
I expect that you also would like "hardware should be designed to always provide a way to update all of its software" to be true.

I don't think you can expect both to be true nowadays. For example, chances are that your battery charging 'hardware' runs some software. That software, if replaced with faulty software, can destroy your batteries and with it, maybe even your motherboard (through fire, acid leaks, and the like)

This applies elsewhere, too. Historically, we had the 'killer poke' (http://www.6502.org/users/andre/petindex/poke/index.html; variants at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke).

Nowadays, it is rumored that buggy baseband firmware for mobile phones can fry the hardware.

I do not think it is feasible to prevent all of these in hardware. Because of that, you must accept "if you can update all software through software, you can brick your device through software".

So, to get to "provide a way to recover from any failure mode that can result from software", you will need to have some unmodifiable software on the device. You also will need that software to allow updating of some firmware and to be free of bugs. I think that is possible, but not economically feasible. Why would anyone spend even a week on bug-checking that earliest running code on a device that will be sold for only six months? That would be giving up the bestselling 4% of the sales cycle.
Ah, but the question isn't Is this a good idea? but Is this legally required?

Not always the same.
Zen Form: distraction-free forms
Managing Puppet modules with librarian-puppet
True Multitasking, Blackberry Balance, Timeshift Camera, Physical Keyboard, Hub, Browser built in HTML5, Mobile Screen Sharing... Did you read the article?
Your post assumes this person is anything other than a political agent in a broken system. Quaint.
In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none) people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics, but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked out for me.
> Richard O'Keefe

Heh, interesting. That brings up this interaction, which I feel characterizes some of the problem:

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...

Loïc's response to him is worth quoting:

"
You are confronted with the problem of wasting a lot of time writing
basement level code to access and update deep values. You think "Great!
I can write DSL or combinators to solve this!". Now you got two
problems, and you haven't come any closer to solving the first one. The
DSL still maps to functions which needs to access and update these
values, and that code is still painful to write. Your next step is to
think "Great! Let's generate all that code then!". Now you got three
problems, and you better hope to have not made any error when writing
that code generator or you'll waste a lot more time. Speaking of time,
by the time you get to that point the PHP developer has already long
finished his bug-free implementation of the same code and is moving on
to other tasks."
Good advice, thank you. I told the employer that since this is a reduction rather than addition, it's more like a punitive system.
I agree. I don't know the game, but it seems likely that there is more to it than your first example. I doubt that they would be reacting the way they are otherwise.

Of course, this might be my own misplaced optimism.
The distinction doesn't matter.

Callers agreed to their conversation recorded only on the condition that 1. it will be used for training purposes and 2. security purposes. There was never an agreement regarding the callers' conversation recorded to be used in a game that makes mockery of the callers and potentially make money from them.
There's actually quite a few mega.co.nz related search sites out there - e.g. my 4 hour weekend project made out of boredom: http://wheresthefiles.at/
Clicking this just brings you here: https://mega.co.nz/#copyright

So it's not likely any content from mega-search.me will ever be removed.
> It's been well over a decade since systems switched to PCI.

I keep getting the two reversed in my head. >_<

I somehow completely missed that the Raspberry and the Parallella featured GPIO pins (and I sank a lot of money into the Parallella Kickstarter!). Thanks for pointing that out to me.
It's even easier than that. I know of local stores in my area (heart of the GTA) that sell them over-the-counter. You just have to know how to ask.
This is not that vulnerability. Their Rails is just fine. This is related to the fact that gems use YAML to store their metadata.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but isn't that exactly the line between syntax and semantics? I'd think that

a b(c x);

is syntactically correct C++ but still not valid C++ code (as in: a well defined line of C++). As far as I know, syntax doesn't depend on whether a type or an identifier or whatever actually exists.
Well besides the lessons about culture that I talked about in the article, there were plenty of lessons about how we should have managed the business differently prior to getting to the trough of sorrow.

The virtual goods and social gaming market were crazy back then. It exploded and came out of nowhere. In amorphous but fast developing markets like that you need to maintain a structure that allows you to stay nimble in order to take advantages of opportunities quickly until you find "the one." We had taken money from the wrong investors, hired a couple of the wrong people in the senior leadership positions, etc that really restricted this.
There is a famous saying here, for such people: " If someone tells you to jump in a well, would you? "

Voilent games can also be seen as a punching bag to vent out your anger, without hurting somebody in actual. It is not always the case that kids turn voilent in real life because of them. Parental guidance is needed at every step of life, blame poor parenting if you have to :?
The 787: A Lesson for the Technologist
Office 2013 is a visual nightmare. The lack of any dividing lines gives me a headache; it feels like a snowstorm.

And just to be more insulting, the UI has random caps. There's no design or reasoning for the caps. They don't indicate clickable things, they don't seem to indicate anything. I spend a fair amount of time in Outlook and Lync - why would I want to subject my eyes to this?
Nice. It's far more noticeable now. Perhaps you can change the icon to a smaller one when the video is full screen, just to indicate to user he is going to make screen smaller after clicking it.
How do you "deeply integrate touch" if the UI still doesn't look touch-ready? Seems like they skimped on a pretty important.
How do you know? Maybe they only put a 32GB disk in there and lied about the size of the bloated OS?
The problem is that word is a flawed product from the outset. It is like a very poor quality version of InDesign with a writing tool clamped on. Its bad for writing and bad for design. Instead they should have users do writing in OneNote and have a separate tool for turning the documents into print versions. This would be much more natural in touch and be much easier to use.
Agreed. In addition to what you've said, too much personalization means too little agency for the user. I wrote a blog post on this a couple of days ago: http://www.ritc.io/you-are-not-the-query/
I don't think that is correct. AFAIK the 'development' side of the heroku status panel is not related to developing, per se, it's the status for apps that are not running on production-level resources... for example, single-dyno apps, or apps not running with production flavor of database.
The trouble with proprietary social networks is not just that they mostly rely on advertising but that they are proprietary. So is app.net and you have to pay for it, too. Why would I pay to be confined in yet another (and very small) walled garden?
> I am not really seeing the moral argument there. MIT's network is designed to be open; a ban on a MAC address is, on such a network, little more than a polite request to not continue your access.

MIT's network is a private network and they have complete authority over who gets to access it, in a legal sense and a moral sense. It's their prerogative to extend access to anyone except specifically chosen people. In our society, we do not treat "get off our lawn" and the equivalent as a "polite request." We treat it as an enforceable demand.

> How conservative of you.

Yes. We live in a society of rules and borders and boundaries. We like those things, so much that we often enforce them with guns (and cheer on those who do). It is not your prerogative to flout them as you please, but your burden to convince us which of those boundaries are unnecessary so we legislate accordingly.

> What gives JSTOR the moral right to tell anyone what they are allowed to do with the articles JSTOR provides to them?

JSTOR at the very least has a moral right to control how he used their private service to download the articles.

> copyrights are in no way related to modern senses of morality or justice

I disagree. I think most people believe that creators are entitled to control the distribution of their work. I think the prevailing mindset is that a digital creation should not be treated differently, for ownership purposes, than a physical creation. Do people download anyway? Sure. But people also sneak into movie theaters. That doesn't mean they feel that theater owners don't have a moral right to exclude non-paying viewers.

To the extent that I think the law is out of step with the modern sense of justice is proportionality. People think (and I'd argue rightfully so), that downloading a movie should warrant the kind of slap on the wrist (if anything) that sneaking into the theater to watch that movie would warrant. Not huge dollar fines and possible jail time.

Swartz's case really boils down to that: the trespassing charge was dropped, while the charge for accessing the network was not. He was trespassing, and he was accessing the network illegally, but if one was minor enough to be dropped the other should have been treated similarly.
> It runs REAL. WINDOWS

Actually it doesn't. It runs some weird OS with a scrabble board of apps.
I have Office 2010, is it worth getting 2013?
Yes, agreed (having worked on middlish-big projects with maybe 40 VS projects for each solution, 45+ minute re-compile times (not from scratch) on the latest gen CPUs, etc) with several hundred million LoC but believe me, if you think that's bad, you don't want to see Eclipse/NetBeans/XCode/etc. with a project a thousandth of that size.
100,000 new tours added to Google Earth tour guide
Youtube used that defense and got away with it, isn't this what the DMCA is for?
This flat design madness has to stop.
What are they doing? Justifying Software Assurance?
Yup, we seem to agree in principle.

Your approach is definitely more complete but also seems to require fairly substantial code changes (OpenPGP?).

My approach should be doable with a mere ~10 lines patch; Gem and bundler should default to '-P HighSecurity' and rubygems.org should reject pushes of unsigned gems.

Anyway, whichever implementation strategy they choose, I hope they will do it soon.
iOS 6.1 adoption on track to be fastest yet
> Marco would write another rant about how MS does not understand the mobile market

That's not really relevant to the legitimacy of the current argument.
It's a train wreck. It's not discoverable (some of those ribbon buttons are god-awful small) and is a huge burden for any existing users to accomodate to (now that it's 7 years old, it's more tolerated and understood, but is still reviled by most users I talk with).