skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a smart move. It's the "strategy tax" which is dumb. It is extraordinarily rare for it to be a smart business choice to not have all of your products be as promiscuous as possible.

Imagine where .net/visual studio/et al would be today if they'd been shipping official VMs (CLRs) targeting linux/unix ages ago.

At this point it's questionable whether or not office is really going to be the breaking point that keeps people from fleeing the MS ship. More so, there's a strong risk that it could work the other way, that people "building a life" (or a business) outside of the Windows walls could find that it's not so hard to live without office, which would hurt MS even more. Also, ensuring that office remains the de facto business standard for the foreseeable future means that MS will always have that opening to entice people back to the Windows platform, the same way mp3 players enticed people to switch to macs, iphones, and ipads.
If they soon give out the OS for free, or dirt cheap, then they will ultimately only care about the applications they sell, meaning that the host OS won't matter nearly as much.
hear hear. its the one single reason why Linux doesn't have too much traction in the non-Engineering workplace.

Google Docs and Presentations are good enough - there is simply nothing close to Excel and VBScript.

note: by this i mean interoperability more than anything else.
"Perl 5" is a programming language. So is "Perl 6". They're sister languages, not competitors.

This release will be "Perl 5" version 20.

As the guy who was responsible for 5.12 and 5.14, I think this is a horrible idea. It'd lead to incredible amounts of user confusion and break all sorts of shit for pretty much no upside other than a version number pissing match with Perl 6.
Agreed. Have given list a try actually, the speed is better, but still not efficient enough.
Real math majors find all this weird category-theoretic jargon in programming pretty dumb. Just so you know.
To do this they'd need to basically implement the Win32 APIs on Linux. And if they did that, that might enable other windows applications to run on desktop Linux. It would be similar to how WINE works, but by Microsoft.
You'd be surprised at how many engineering companies (research and otherwise) use Excel. I'd argue that it is used more than Matlab or any other programming language/environment in some fields (like Mech Eng).

Now that is just a small subset of all the little corporations that use it for bookkeeping and what else (those could probably get by with libreoffice) and every other major company in the world.

Microsoft was also smart in moving to docx and xlsx because libreoffice doesn't support that very well and now has an even better reason for people to avoid switching, I'd like to assume they don't support the open formats for this same reason.
We use a keychain system for that and store the public key in active directory. That allows us to revoke at a per user level all keys. We do a lot of integration and use 25 different external APIs including s3.

BAsically, we don't use global config like that by design - the application only recovers the security context on demand.
Thanks for your thoughts but how can a walled garden like Meteor can be the best choice for anything?

Meteor tries to create an entire new ecosystem using Node's merits. The reference you posted lists pseudo reasons for choosing a new package system. I don't know if here is the right place to discuss them but some of them are heavily misleading and primarily business-driven and motivated by a developer's lock in. It's important to state that especially Node's npm is one of the most modern package managers around and already solving issues like repeatability, asset building and bundling (npm's concept is totally different though). Sure there's a need for package management on the client side but coupling everything together is not the answer.

I highly appreciate the talented team behind Meteor and their achievements up to now but it's sad and a deal breaker that they choose this non-npm route.

As a final point, I am aware that maybe it can be good to have competing JS on the server ecosystems and all JS users will benefit at the end from this competition.
That package is it. It's in the universe repo, which is disabled by default (I think), so I didn't want to claim scrypt was as convenient as openssl.
Site is down. I suspect this isn't true.
I doubt that. I don't think they made Win32 for Mac OS. It probably isn't much different than their Mac OS port.
I tried a search using "California" as the only input variable.

A total of seven results were returned. Only two were in the state of California. Only one was a tech job (programmer analyst). The others were for a pharmacist, a dentist, a professor, two office managers, and a football coach.

Is this thing on?
Quake 3 Arena timedemo on top of the lima driver
The sign-ups numbers alone don't mean anything until you compare them with the visitor numbers. I doubt saturation of a background image, which likely has no call to action itself, was the factor.

This isn't an A/B test, this is postulating a possible reason for an event.
If Dick is a systems programmer, his code would look pretty much exactly like Harry's, except he'd call it a priority queue of capacity 1.

And he'd have written it over breakfast, while Harry was still pondering the side problem of analytically defining the volume of his bath tub :)
I've gone emacs => Rubymine => Textmate => Rubymine => Textmate => Sublime

The issue I have with Rubymine is that it's way too slow. It's just too slow to be productive in.

Macbook Air 2nd gen, 4 gig.
Sorry if I'm being stupid, but how does this solve the problem of using arbitrary/variable length sequences of, say, numbers as map keys?
This is a rumour that MS is taking a meaningful look at porting Office to Linux. All it takes is one OS exec to say "you're doing WHAT?!!!" and this meaningful look will be quietly stopped.

Even if they do port, I'd expect it to be broken in many ways, each popping up a "This wouldn't happen if you were running on Windows" dialog. MS just won't be able to help itself.
My arse. Sorry but this is link bait.
You may need to unblock scripts from jasq.org.
the fixing of the problem is easy , use freaking envirronment variables ! there is not one language/framework whatever that doesnt support them , so for exemple in node :

> var db_password = process.env.DB_PASS ;

You dont have to keep any password sensitive file whatever inside an opensource project. that is what envirronment variables are fucking made for !
Office is built on higher level APIs than win32. COM would be a major sticking point though ad that entire stack is huge.
I apologize for the condescension. I just think these are concepts worth knowing and that they shouldn't be looked down on so much. A lot of people are never going to learn this stuff if they dismiss it so quickly. And that holds back not just themselves but anybody they work with who does understand this stuff.

One of my favorite quotes about software development is that the hardest part of it is not being clever. The flip side, though, is that even the simplest things can seem clever to those who don't have the same breadth of knowledge. In this case, Harry had a solution that seemed clever, but really wasn't that crazy at all. None of his colleagues understood it, but they should have, because it was actually extremely simple.

What's ludicrous about Harry's account isn't his solution or his notion of "adding" employees. It's that he understood these concepts and still took a day to put it together (or that he completely glossed over the more obvious approaches). He wasn't productive at all.

Anyway, as for the terminology, it's just a common name for an associative binary operation on a set with an identity element. If you've never seen it used in this way, I agree that it can seem bizarre, but the more you think about it the more you'll realize it is in line with a generalization of the sort of addition you do on integers.
That part is actually a good layman's explanation of how the monoid here works. But then he goes on to talk about seeding a catamorphism with an identity employee.
I don't know about "unjustly". Firing an employee for posting a customer's signature on the Internet seems absolutely fair.

If the signature had been cropped out, leaving just the note, and the waitress was still dismissed then all this outrage would have been understandable.
Dungeons and Dragons! But that might be because the only D&D forays into cinematography have been less than spectacular.
I think this is what they're leaning toward with their next iteration of Windows in Windows 9/Windows Blue or whatever they're going to call it. Desktop operating systems have become a commodity, but Microsoft still prices theirs like it's the mid 90s.
Kielhofner is a pretty awesome guy. I met him a couple of times "back in the day" at Astricon conferences when he was hacking together Astlinux.

He was instrumental in taming the Soekris and Alix SBC boards of old and creating Asterisk appliances with them. If you've got a little asterisk box running on some embedded looking hardware somewhere, it doesn't matter whose name is on the sticker, its got some Kielhofner in it.

I live about a mile from Star2Star. I ought to pop in one of these days and see what they're up to.
Raspberry Pi Announces $25 Camera Module
Yes there has: mortal kombat. It captured the essence of the game perfectly and lets face it, the sound track was awesome.

Flawless victory!
Appears quite legit.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118065765/
Ohboy, let's go:

* Calc's pivot tables is clunky, while working on Excel 2010 is like working on butter with a hot knife. No, it's not a "getting used to" thing.

* Basic stuff like filter/sorting tools: Excel has a far better flow that helps you get the job done faster

* DataNitro

* Charting in libreoffice is broken. I use ggplot for most of my day jobs, but sometimes when you need to pull up a quick chart, LibreOffice serves to only nerf your speed. Again, not one of those "getting used to" thing

* Try pivot-tabling a 1M row csv in Calc.

* VBScript (though that's now more and more subplanted by DN)

* Analysis tools - Excel is just so much richer.

These things LibreOffice is better than Excel:

* CSV (excel's a little clunky with CSV import)

* regex search

EDIT: formatting
Why do public restrooms have low quality toilet paper and towels?
ahahahahahAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I can't fully understand why I find this so funny but I am just falling out of my seat laughing.

While I find this extremely comical, I am excited to see the consequences of this for desktop linux. The way I see it, the more people who use linux the better it will become :).
Seconded. For many people, its their only foothold into the world of macros and programming, even if its via VBA horribleness.
Is Youtube embed system down?
Youtube embedded videos using Iframe not working anywhere.

Example: http://www.labnol.org/internet/embed-youtube-playlists/17687/#obama

Is the system to embed Youtube videos, fallen?

30 minutes later the issue is fixed...
Ha! Didn't see that one, thought it linked to the original paper, as well, thanks!
I've never done any legacy BB development, but coding for the playbook / BB10 is pretty excellent. Write C/C++ like you normally do for any *nix/Qt type system (using the Eclipse based IDE); Compile locally and deploy over the air to the device; stdout/err get sent back to the Eclipse console. I remember being really surprised at first at how easy it was to rip through the build/deploy cycle. The dev kit is pretty well done.

I can say with certainty that there is no RIM server involved beyond getting a Dev cert at the very beginning. You can develop offline and deploy over an ad hoc LAN or USB - so there's no requirement for Blackberry to sign your dev builds.

Anyway, if you haven't looked into it, do. There's also a bunch of BB folks on github porting libraries and such to BB10, so if the library you want isn't in the SDK, it may already be ported. Though in my experience it's pretty easy to just build most vaguely POSIX compliant code yourself.
This is a really unpopular opinion[1], so I hope I don't get a lot of flak here, but while Half-Life 1 had a lot of intrigue, Half-Life 2 felt plain awful and I'm not really sure how they could turn any of #2 into movie material unless they really de-emphasized Gordon to the point where he's a minor character.

You'll notice, after all, that most live-action stuff centered around the Half-Life universe doesn't really contain any Gordon (at least the ones I've seen)[2].

Half-Life 1 was the story of a scientist caught up in something much larger than himself. You played this hapless guy who escaped and explored worlds, with compelling confusion about who your enemies and friends were. It was dream-like and scary and mysterious and great.

Half-life 2 felt like you were being lead through a metaphorical tunnel the entire game. Literally some parts had NPCs reminding you to "go this way" for hour-long stretches. Most of the game wasn't escaping terrifying situations, instead it felt like you were merely "in transit". It's hard to have a thrilling feeling of excitement and horror as you're being nagged to get to the next plot device.

What's more, whereas in HL1 you were this scientist caught up in a mess, in HL2 you play essentially the role of a hired brute. You do zero Gordon-specific things. When you meet Barney at the start of the game, if you swapped bodies with Barney at that moment, nothing in the game would have changed at all. Congrats on that MIT degree the NPCs will remind you, now kindly plow through 6,000 bugs/zombies/cycloptic humans as we tell you what to do.

I have a inkling that the sour direction HL2 took is at least part of the reason they're having trouble with HL3 but who's to say. Most reviews say its one of the greatest games ever, so maybe I'm way off kilter.

Anyway, I think a Half-Life movie, if it covered any of the events in Half-Life 2 at all, would suffer severe problems if it tries to make a story of a mute scientist who kills his way to the 90th floor of Castle X to save the world. It's just not a very compelling story.

[1] I was lambasted for offering this opinion on Reddit. The game also has a 96 on Metacritic, with zero negative reviews: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/half-life-2

That makes it the #1 all-time highest scoring game on Metacritic (tied with HL1!), which seems insane to me, and several (in my opinion) better games within that genre come to mind.

[2] What I was thinking of specifically was "Escape from City 17": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo
[Patent] Trolls and Tribulations
I thought silent hill was quite good, probably due to less rigid 'canon' allowing for flexibility in characters and story. Admittedly, this would make it the exception and not the rule. I also think this means that Half Life/Portal would not translate well into a movie.
I'd say this advice is spot on, in a much smaller manner I experienced a similar problem and I became such a nuisance to the company who had bought my company that they actually granted my vesting nearly two months early so I would leave the company.

I was miserable. I went from being the guy who made decisions to being a "regional manager" which to me meant I sat on a LOT of conference calls.

I think the final straw for me with the C-level execs at the company I sold to was a conference call that went like this:

Call with 40+ managers discussing company wide budget figures. Second conference call of the day and the 6th of the week. It was Wednesday.

"So, do we have any ideas on cost cutting techniques that we could employ while still keeping our company as a whole working together?"

One guy chimes in about a rebuild of the company's intranet, another mentions having more folks visit our company's data center on a regular basis to understand what they can provide.

My suggestions ... "Hey guys .... Why don't we just get off the fucking phone??!"

...

...

Crickets.

Now in retrospect this was terrible. I embarrassed the CEO and the CFO and more importantly myself, but looking back now I know the reason is because I was not happy with the position I took. I had very little freedom in my job(something i was not at all used to) and I directly oversaw almost no one meaning that I had very few people to share tips or tricks with which was one of the things I had enjoyed most at my office.

I would have probably been happy training new management, or doing just about anything other than what I was doing, but it was not something I'd ever considered.

Taking the time to consider what you really want out of an acquisition and fighting for it is certainly worth it, no one wants to be the guy sitting around counting his days.
I dislike this sort of limit. The best freemium schemes provide a full enough featured service for free users and fee-based services that obviously make sense for a segment of customers willing and able to pay. Limiting the number of services severely cripples the basic service.
The point being: right now distro provided packages are screened and vetted, as are steam games. Moving away from that model has obvious security implications.
Over the last two years I have moved away from Excel, Word and PowerPoint to R/Sweave/LaTeX/beamer/git as fast as possible. I got so sick of version changes in VBA breaking code, 3rd party modules that were locked and couldn't be fixed, and binary files that suck up space in version control. I see my coworkers using spread sheets and PowerPoint files where databases and complete, reproducible reports should be used. Tremendous amounts of tacit knowledge is buried on network shares and forgotten. I find the community support for R/RStudio/LateX/git much better than Microsoft's support.
Office is their business. If people are going to switch to Linux anyway, might as well sell them a subscription to Office still. It is starting to matter less and less which OS is running as things move to the browser and "cloud". The Windows monopoly is over, so MS would be smart to admit that and start looking for business opportunities that transcend the OS, one of which is Office.
Good article, reminds me of The Myth of the Garage essay by the Heath bros [1]. And the unforgettable high-school slogan "luck (or success) is where preparation meets opportunity." You don't always control the opportunities.

[1] http://www.heathbrothers.com/the-myth-of-the-garage/

edit: misquoted the unforgettable
There have been a few good web comics[1] and short videos[2] based around D&D. I can envision a D&D movie.

[1] http://www.goblinscomic.com/06262005/
[2] http://www.urealms.com/content.php?150-Unforgotten-Realms-Ep...
I use www.xero.com ...it's awesome.
Angels: Questions for Entrepreneurs, Part II
Writer is fine, Calc is somewhat ok for light spreadsheet users.

but

Presentations? That thing (whatever it's called) is just unusable IMO. Way too many clicks to do anything, crap looking standard templates, crap looking animations. Powerpoint completely blows it out of the water and let's beter not speak about Keynote.

So any manager / engineer / researcher probably won't be happy with LibreOffice, since presentations are just a fact of life and you need to be able to get them done quickly.
> I'd give that one to Austria, of the places I've lived, actually.

Pastries, sure. Bread, no.
Add a real doll and call it a day.
Oh I do use R + Numpy a lot too, but Excel has really been indispensible.

I agree with you about spreadsheets being used where databases make more sense though.
http://try.discourse.org/ is ridiculously fast.
While I agree that is what is supposed to happen, it rarely does. My father worked for a company for 30 years and was fired for age discrimination (his reviews were always good, well liked at the company). He basically wrote everything there was for training new employees at the company as well and was the head of their training department.

However, they brought in a new HR director and CEO that wanted to "shake things up" and the HR guy had a buddy from his former company that wanted to come in and work with him and happened to do a similar job that my dad did. You can probably guess what happened next, my father was fired without much of a reason. Those in executive positions that could have stood up for him were either in the minority or retired, so he had little help to back him up.

My family pushed him to sue, but he felt pressured into taking their severance package because he had to support my brothers and my mother and was worried about his prospects of getting a job in his 50s at another company (despite having a Bachelor's and Master's degree from well-known schools). He ended up taking the severance and waived his right to sue (at least according to the agreement he signed). He was also afraid that suing would blacklist him from employment elsewhere and it was hard for him to bring himself to sue the business he once loved. Coming from the age when many were loyal to their companies, even if the company was not loyal to them, he just couldn't do it.

Since then, he's applied at numerous employers for similar jobs to his own as well as other ones he could segue into. However, no one wants to hire him basically because of his age despite no intentions of retiring anytime soon. Now, he works a low wage job he could get without a degree from a university and it just kills me to see him like that. My only wish is to eventually grow my own business enough I can hire him myself so he can do something more respectable. He's not a huge tech guy like me so getting him into software development with me is a bit more than possible, but he's a smart guy that would fit into many other business and training related roles. However, those roles are something I can't pay for when I'm either working for clients, my own projects or with a friend right now.

Although age discrimination is against the law in the US, it's much more complex than it appears for most cases and suing is a difficult question that could hurt as much as it could help. I've always been reluctant to talk about my father's ordeal, but I felt I had to get it off my chest at some point.

edit: few grammar errors
I will never forgive Abrams for the eternal clusterfuck of plot betrayal that was Lost, and intend to express this by boycotting anything he has a hand in forever.
a. Steam on Linux is still in beta and relatively new

b. Cutting-edge triple A titles? No, not yet. Older, but well seasoned triple-A titles? Getting there (e.g., Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2). High-quality indie titles? Quite a selection, actually (e.g., Minecraft, Humble Indie Bundles, etc...).
I find that to be pretty typical - naive solutions are bad for Big-O reasons.
If you solve the math on paper and implement a straightforward algorithm, you get the fastest possible solution.
If you push some of that math into the type system of your language, you get something that should be Big-O equivalent to the fastest possible solution, but the machinery of the type system never gets fully optimized away. There might be other advantages, though, of having that machinery - your compiler might be able to detect errors in your code, or you might be able to use higher-level constructs to make more concise code. Maybe.
Funny you say that. I've moved my presentation workflow entirely to HTML5+JS. d3 is amazeballs and should be used at every available instance (and so is raphael)
its an awesome book, just bought it from amazon like two weeks ago, its amazing how simple it makes it to pick up Perl quickly
If true, I think this is good news both for Linux and for Office.

Just as an aside, I've installed Office 365 (the Office 2013 annual subscription program) and my tentative assessment is positive. I like the overall feel and functionality once you turn off animation. This evening, I found I really enjoyed the new alignment and drawing guides in Powerpoint 2013. They make Powerpoint a solid diagramming tool.

At $99/year for installation on five family PCs, the pricing is much more reasonable.