skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you give an example of this spectacular failure you are referring to?
It looks way more like an iPhone than what I have generally associated with the name Blackberry where half the device is a landscape screen and half of it a keyboard. I also think it's fair to say that the iPhone popularized the look of having the general shape and design of an LCD panel. While the comparison is certainly not black and white, I don't think it's fair to snarkily claim OP is pretending. I do think it's fair to say the new device has a similar overall shape and design as the iPhone. Watching the video review on the Verge I was also struck that they had chosen to go in a visual direction similar to iOS and Android rather than strike off in a new direction like Microsoft.
Great question! It's something I thought a lot about. When we originally did the project, I engineered for long-term sustainability.

I picked Java because even then it was obvious that Java was the new COBOL. Which had its drawbacks, but that meant high stability and longevity.

I avoided complex dependencies; it ran by keeping all data in a single process and writing everything out to a set of XML docs on a filesystem. There the bet was that Moore's Law would progress faster than the data set size or the usage volume; that turned out to be true. The only real dependencies were on the core Java and Java Servlet stuff, plus an XML library.

That simple architecture made it relatively sysadmin-friendly. Data was backed up by a simple script that just checked everything into CVS every 15 minutes. When they needed to move it to a new machine there was just setting up a standard Tomcat container, dumping in the WAR, and pointing it at the data. So there was never any significant downtime.

I also wrote a bunch of unit tests, so that in theory it would be easy for another developer to pick up. Only a couple of other devs worked on it, though, so it's hard to say how much that helped. But I was really happy to have the tests a few years later when we reved it.

Eventually it got rewritten in whatever their in-house dev was using so it could be more integrated with the existing accounts. The original code base lasted a decade or so, though, so I'm satisfied with how most of the initial choices worked out.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/9042547/303896

https://github.com/dustin/ruby-trie
A little dip into Ruby's Marshal format (Part 1 / 3)
> How much of it is free doesn't really matter for the sake of advertising.

We never really advertised it would work. We can't help that people assumed they would get a working surface!
We treated .gems like source tarballs (they can't even express non-Ruby dependencies, Gem::Specification#requirements are treated as comments), and only used rubygems.org for newer versions of our dependencies to be packaged as .rpms for test and production deployments. I found that to be much more sane than bypassing the system package manager and smuggling random crap onto dev servers, much less production.
> source of all dependencies possible should be in your repository

How far do you go? Do you include libxml for building nokogiri? Heck, do you include libc and gcc for building any gem with a C extension?

Coming from Java, Maven and something like Nexus Sonatype make it easy (for certain values of "easy") to run a proxy repository. The equivalent of all "gem install <some_gem>" goes through the proxy, which continues to serve gems even if the original source goes away.

I don't particularly like the inclusion of dependencies in a repository. Is this a custom version "some guy" long gone from the company created three years ago? Can I safely upgrade it to get security fix <X>? I suppose similar questions arise no matter the source...

This is reason why you cryptographically sign your gems before publishing them. I (unfortunately) had not known this was supported by RubyGems, but it is: http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/21

But I'll bet very few gems are signed. Rails does not appear to be:

$ gem install rails -P HighSecurity
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::Exception)
Unsigned gem
Hm, this article didn't resonate very much with me.

"Currently, Facebook is the only company in the world with enough direct social graph data to create the most perfect form (at least comparatively) of implicit personalization. That’s what Facebook is – a platform for current evolution phase of content discovery and consumption. Do this for me: Go to any major publisher site (The New York Times, Huffington Post, or for sports fans, ESPN) and take a look at it for a bit."

Frankly I don't go to Facebook to get news, I go there to see what my friends and family are up to. They may share news articles they think are interesting, but often that doesn't coincide with what I'm into, which is ok.

I actually don't go to a publisher site. I prefer curated aggregation: techmeme & hacker news for tech news, memeorandum and google news for political news, longform.org, longreads.com and thebrowser.com for longer more thoughtful articles, and finally google reader for photography related sites. My friends are horrible curators... is that just me? Or do people really get all their news from their FB friends?
Up until 4.0-ish you didn't have great native UI libraries and so forth to help you quickly put together a native app w/o designing a UI library from the ground up.
#1 is very important. It reminds me, in a good way, of Machiavelli's advice that if we must do wrongs, we should do them all at once.
Late, not later.
I would tend to disagree that building upon another platform like Gmail is "strategically hampered". We (streak.com) think its the only way to get users to switch to your email service - build it on top of their existing email client (gmail) and slowly start replacing pieces of the Gmail stack until they are exclusively using you.

Thats been our not-so-secret strategy from the beginning. It allows the user to slowly onboard to your product instead of making a one time "do I want to switch over my email?" type of decision which is obviously much harder.
I don't think he recorded it as much as remembered experiences he had and transcribed them down independently.
Honestly the change from 2010 to 2013 is bigger than the change from 2007 to 2010 - particularly all of the cloud stuff. (It's actually quite cool to have the same most recently used documents when you open up an Office app, regardless of which computer you're on).

In any case - overall I somewhat agree with the article, though I'd be surprised if Microsoft isn't aware of this themselves. I think Office 2013 is a solid upgrade for the desktop - though a solid touch version is indeed lacking. Here's to hoping they have one on the way, hopefully sooner than 3 years from now...
You are incorrect: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-status#status-i...

I agree that the production/development split is not entirely clear without additional explanation. We've spent a lot of time thinking about how to communicate these things and have so far not come up with a way that we feel better describes the issues at hand.
The man who blew his face off chewing gum
Windows

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/effdiary.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/winaes.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/software/security/encrypt.html
Aha! Cool thanks. The Q10. Geez looking at that thing makes me wonder why the hell Motorola aren't investing in improving the Pro+ and the Master. That Q10 looks like a piece of shit.

I LOVE the Pro+ but they're faulty as hell (random reboots, screen freezes etc.) in fact a lot of Motorola's have this problem (judging from various forums). It's basically the only phone in the world I can use - incredible form factor and the only usable candy bar qwerty android phone - so frustrating that they're almost impossible to get and then those you do get, are faulty.

STEP UP MOTOROLA!
I'll repost the working list that I posted above: True Multitasking, Blackberry Balance, Timeshift Camera, Physical Keyboard, Hub, Browser built in HTML5, Mobile Screen Sharing...

This article doesn't do the best job of highlighting (or even mentioning) some of these innovations. I get the feeling the author just likes the blinking light (even if it's already been done).
Thanks for the feedback!

The predictions intentionally haven't been updated. With bets the adversarial bet definition process produced clear, ajudicatable criteria. Predictions, though, were intended to be looser. We just wanted to record them, and didn't want to be in charge of deciding them.

If I had it to do over again, I'd be tempted to solve the problem in a crowdsourced way, where people get to opine on the outcome of the prediction endlessly.

I'll check out PredictionBook; it looks interesting. And if you want to discuss this stuff with me or the Long Now staff, feel free to get in touch.
How to never ship a product
There's also one for Berlin: http://berlinstartups.com/
109 currently listed.
Picture of the inside: http://garzikrants.blogspot.com/2013/01/avalon-modular-room-...

I hope this will put a stop to most of the non-believers constantly trolling on bitcointalk.org
It works only in Google Chrome. It downloads the file first and then asks you where do you want to save it.
I guess that taste in IDEs is a very personal thing. I am using Visual Studio 10 at the moment to do C++ coding and it is by far, and without question, the worst IDE I've ever used.

I find it slow, buggy and quite unfriendly. My guess is that people pay money for plugins to get it fit for purpose.

IDEs I prefer: Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, QtCreator
If the author of this site is reading this, fix your scripts:

Notice: Undefined index: lg in /home/sites/mega/config.php on line 49
Sounds generally similar to Aspera, RaptorQ, etc. It's not clear what's new here, if anything.
Magnetic transistor could cut power consumption and make chips reprogrammable
I read somewhere that the challenge with posting your projects with Kickstarter is getting the attention of people and hence most of them do not reach their funding goal.
In my research I came across what I think is the best explanation for the cause for violence in our society. I believe video games are just another symptom but not the cause and effect.

"Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality."
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/13/the-spirit-level
Groupthink can also be an issue as well within certain pockets of communities.
Parenting is the real issue here. If you can't teach your kids the difference between reality and fantasy, you have failed.

I had caring parents who love video games. I have been playing violent games since my dad got Doom for our N64. I am a well-adjusted individual with a good job, a happy relationship, a stable living condition, and plenty of friends.

Why didn't video games turn me violent? It's probably because while my parents love games, they didn't let me sit in front of them 24/7. They made sure I did my work, had an after-school job, was involved in clubs, etc. The same applies for any other medium, like TV. Everything in moderation.It's not the job of the video game industry to make sure kids are only playing x-hours per day, it is the parents'.
This isn't negative. It's a great comment.

I think there's more to my interview than your short summary. For example, Michael made a mistake that's common to people who start with their own pain, so he pretty much had to scrap a whole year's worth of work.

What he learned was that he -- as an author -- was experiencing a ton of pain when he submitted to manuscripts to publishers. But the pain wasn't caused by the way he submitted his work to them. It was caused by the way their processed what he (and other authors) sent.

The cure for this was to have outside conversations. Picking the right person to talk to is a whole other part of this interview, but I won't get into it here. I don't want to recreate the interview.
I wanted to apologize, I've thought about it and I realize that was a really horrible thing for me to write. I've taken down the images and the scribd link but I can't seem to delete the original post or the mega link anymore.
I wish these perennial programming font lists would make clear up-front which fonts are designed with anti-aliasing (or ClearType) in mind.

I don't like the fuzzy look of anti-aliased fonts, plus I typically work with two monitors, one in landscape mode, and one rotated 90 degrees for portrait mode. I don't think ClearType works correctly in this case anyhow.

So far I haven't found anything I like better than BitStream Vera Sans Mono.
Is the argument that a touch version of Office is more important than a web-friendly version? Moving to a JavaScript-based add-in model and adding native support for SkyDrive seem like fairly big, worthwhile, and forward-looking additions to me. In contrast, I don't think that touch-friendliness is really very important - it would be nice to have, but I doubt most office workers are going to be doing a lot of editing on tablets.

There are also plenty of nice new features too, like flash-fill in Excel and PDF reading in Word. I really think Office 2013 is a nice, if not critical, update.
I was an early team member at Viximo...

As a team we all still believed that we could accomplish big things together. On top of that, we didn't want to let each other down.

Like Brian pointed out, the culture was established at the beginning. Folks were recruited on how well they would gel and adopt a core set of values in addition to pure talent.
Re-read the comment you replied to. It said that this UI doesn't look touch-ready because it's just a reskin of 2010 while they make that touch-ready version.
Nice, but it reinvents yet another templating which is hard to replace and seems to support only mongoDB :(
I think video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people. But the First Amendment limits what we can do about video games and the Second Amendment to the Constitution limits what we can do about guns.

Wow. He's managed to combine "they say the darndedst things" with "that pesky constitution, always in the way of the best ideas".

I'm sympathetic to the cause of limiting the power of weapons available to average citizens, but with this guy on my side, I'm not sure the opposition has much work to do. By dragging another amendment that people are passionate about into it, he effectively makes his case impossible to argue.
Dalton is very patient, damn frugal, and smart. His API programming team is off-the-charts talented (essentially 14 Stanford and Carnegie Mellon guys), and here's the important part - they get along very, very well. So, the team is tight, and thinking long term.

They've got a rock-solid cash position, and I wouldn't be surprised for Marc Andreessen to re-invest after 2 years, just to own a piece of this flex infrastructure for such a small $ amount.

Today's announcement is exactly what's next. Building more ways to "roll your own social network". The API is amazingly rich - the developers love it.

For example, messaging is far beyond Twitter's broken DM mechanism. The API allows you to DEFINE messaging protocols, and uniquely build a social network with a distinct message system. It's software-definable, via the API.

What's actually happened in the first 5-1/2 months is that the "core API" is finally finished. They've actually unbundled all the core social 2.0 infrastructures.

Watch for more creative "edge API" ideas (like this social Dropbox) to come out, now that the core team of 14 is freeing up to invent.
No; if "c" is not a type, then there are no grammar rules which will allow you to produce that statement. So, as you parse that text, when you get to "c", you have to ask, "Is 'c' a type?" The answer you get will determine which subsequent grammar rules you apply. That context - having to know something about "c" that was described elsewhere - isn't technically semantics. It's an assertion just that "c" appeared elsewhere in the text, and when we parsed it, it was in a particular location in the grammer (which just so happens to mean it is a type - but the parser doesn't need to know what that means).

An example of syntactically correct, but semantically undefined code is:

*(static_cast<int*>(NULL)) = 42;

The difference between here and above is that there is nothing in the grammar that can tell you "this is an error". It's only an error because of the semantics that we've given to the operations.
There is a famous saying here, for such people: " If someone tells you to jump in a well, would you? "

Bad example: I wouldn't but a lot of kids are easily influenced.

And no, I don't support a ban or censorship of games. I see this and guns as part of life, bad stuff happens some times, like when you cross the street and a car or a lightning might hit you.
the first comment there is reasonable - suffix arrays seem to be preferable anyway (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_array). but i am not a biologist so perhaps i am missing something? (what?)

(i am not questioning the wider point about it being nice to have a good suffix tree library; just curious why it's important here).

[thanks for the replies]
For a long time, I agreed that the RIM parent company makes sense if their software services were being licensed out.

I'm making an assumption (and I think the rebrand supports this) that RIM/BB has made a conscious decision to be a consumer hardware company, that is their priority, and any software services are a value-add or in support of their hardware. While this comparison is weak, it's almost like how Apple can be seen as a hardware company and the iCloud is in support of it.

I do think the renaming was probably made in haste, to coincide with BB10's release
Kickstarter: How do I set up my project to get over-subscribed?
Hi Folks, I am launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund illustrating and printing a kids' book. How does one set up Rewards to get over-subscribed? I keep hearing about over-subscribed but we are raising $7500 and the total of rewards offered is $7500. Am I cutting off my chances of getting oversubscribed? My research has not provided the answer. Please help!
I hope someone somewhere is documenting all the Bitcoin farming hardware.

The future people would probably like a nice list of things that people are trying. Bitcoin mining (and to a lesser extent Folding@home) are entry level clustering for hobbyists.
Excel has very useful increased functionality

(I know, I know... use R or something but shh)
It might also be because video games have a poor correlation towards gun violence in general. Video games exist in other countries that don't have our style of gun violence. Of course, I suppose it's possible that those other countries have superior parenting, as well.
7 books Kevin Rose can't live without
That doesn't explain the mass rampage murders, which have been all committed by wealthy or upper-middle class perpetrators. Plus, violent crime in America is decreasing even while poverty is increasing.
I think as an entrepreneur, you are gonna need to do your homework and figure out how to get the attention to your project regardless of using Kickstarter or not.

Lockitron was a perfect example that used Selfstarter to fund their project and got a lot of attention from users without the help of any organization like Kickstarter.
It's interesting that "violent games" and "violent music" often get blamed (often by the same people), but "violent films" or "violent novels" less often. I would guess demographics are a big part of it: lots of people who don't think of themselves as potential killers like horror films, but they think of video games, or black metal, as something only weird obsessives are into, because people in their circles aren't into them.

I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films, than I am by people playing Call of Duty or buying Dimmu Borgir albums, but ymmv.

edit: That isn't to say that I think violent films should be banned, either. But I'm more weirded out by the fact that some really gory stuff is really popular, than I am by anything that comes out of the game or music industries.
A Rorschach Test for Founders
Breaking backwards compatibility may be ok for windows, but it's pretty much a nonstarter for office -- i still run office 97 on an old machine because of some add-ins
The article ignores the real issue-- the impact of violent video games and movie content on children. There's no First Amendment right for kids to access violent content.
Pretty sure there's a Google property with the same cloud + gears loading animation. Blogger, or Tumblr or Blogspot or one of those.
Why didn't video games turn me violent? It's probably because while my parents love games, they didn't let me sit in front of them 24/7. They made sure I did my work, had an after-school job, was involved in clubs, etc....

I agree with what you are saying but compare apples to apples. The Senator tried to blame (maybe also blame) games for the shootings when many are calling for limiting gun /gun variety ownership. So to be fair, we should mention that not everyone with a gun shoots his classmates either.
Huge Asteroid Nears Earth
Disney's Paperman
I know nothing about nothing, but having that many projects under the same solution its the biggest clue that you are doing something very wrong.

Even if you have a reason to have 40 projects in what should looks like one solution you can still create various solutions files with just the subset of projects you need. No one works on 40 projects at the same time.
OP here. Actually, their logic is that this way they can scan files for viruses (not kidding). (E.g., from gmail attachments.)
http://twitter.com/hspter/status/296715920389320705
Truth isn't a binary, it's a gradient. There's both rational and emotional truth in many things we label wrong or unjust.

Meanwhile, we evolved to sift through information rapidly towards self-preservation. This has obvious drawbacks like any other broad algorithm would. Let's not get proud of whatever cohort we identify with; logical fallacies are the norm at any level of intelligence.

Many of our truths conflict with other societal and even personal truths. You can want children with a loving wife and still find pleasure in extramarital affairs. Both have sound biological and psychological rewards that carry paradoxically self-sabotaging complications.

Add to that cultural and technological shifts, disparities in wealth and power, the weakness of language, and many other complications which won't fit into the box I'm typing in.

Truth is complicated and dynamic enough as a philosophical concept, let alone with the innate irrationality we all share.
The trick with doing this in a language without reference counting (like C) is keeping track of who owns the buffer all your slices point to. Windows uses UNICODE_STRING[1] internally for a great many things, paths being one of them. There are some functions[2][3] in the FilterManager's API for parsing paths that take advantage of this so as to avoid allocating extra memory for path components that already exist in the original path.

Note also the proscription against modifying the parsed path components[3] because they're shared. Since there's no support for immutable strings, you're counting on everybody to read the documentation and follow it. Admittedly, this specific restriction comes about from getting the file name information from the FilterManager in the first place, which has the explicit purpose of reducing the number of copies of paths floating around in kernel memory, but it still demonstrates the original point of needing to know who owns the memory at the end of the day.

[1]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa38...
[2]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff5...
[3]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff5...
There is no evidence that sufficient experience playing (say) Doom deathmatch will turn anyone into a mass killer. 'Moderation' is probably a red herring.