skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody's end goal is being able to buy some gum with APPL either.
This might be obvious, but its not that this is something new. Lightbulb makers want to sell lightbulbs to you forever, so they wont give you ones that will never need to be replaced!
> the Germans had plans for _everything_ in their drawers

We (the US) learned to do the same thing, even to the extreme of War Plan Red, the plan to fight the UK and its colonies, beginning 1927 and updated through 1939. It broke down into sub-plans, one for the UK itself and one for each major colony, including War Plan Crimson, the plan to invade Canada.

Did we imagine we'd have to actually fight the Brits? No, not really; we were just being prepared.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red
This is another cool light bulb : http://lifx.co/
When I was a kid in the early 1990's, there was a very vibrant shareware game community in my home country Finland. I remember putting my pocket money to envelopes and sending it to these hobbyist game authors, to their home address and then waiting for weeks for them to ship my game back in a floppy disk.

There was a magazine that had monthly reviews of games and software and the magazine hosted a BBS where you could download the demos. There were so many Finnish shareware games back in the day that they had separate sections for Finnish and Foreign games and apps in the mag. Some of the local games had mild international success too.

Some of the games I still remember by name: Triplane Turmoil, Mine bombers, Slicks'n'Slide.

The internet has brought us many things, but we've also lost something because of that.
I'm not entirely agreeing with everything here - there was a lot of communication going on through the Windows developer blogs, with (at times ridiculously long) postings on the state of Win8 development. The problem was however that this was a total one-way communication. The hundreds of comments (some angry, some reasonable) below were ignored. I don't think there was a single positive response to ditching the start button over the metro interface. Yet still they did it (and it's shit, as expected (imho)).
Granted, there was a lot of whining about dropping the Glass look as well, and I have to admit that the new win8 theme looks quite nice now that I see it in real life.
The fact however that the first thing I do is put a shortcut to a shutdown batch file on my desktop, so I don't have to jump through hoops to find that menu, says it all. I ditched win8 within days.
So according to the author: 1.) Successful platforms keep devs in the loop, 2.) Azure keeps devs in the loop, 3.) ∴ “AZURE IS GOING TO WIN”

I’d like to see some data to back up his claims that Azure “has the Big Mo” and that it’s displacing Amazon + Salesforce.
This isn't really a new thing though, is it. There is the (in)famous example of Ron Jeffries trying to solve Sudoku through TDD (and failing miserably). http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/

Compare and contrast his impotent flailing with Peter Norvig's masterful approach.
http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Of course for the lulz you had people like Spolsky and Martin all use it to set out their view of software engineering with essays like Duct Tape Programming and Echoes from the Stone Age.

Anyway ... The conclusion from it all was that TDD works best as a design tool for interface discovery. That you get a regression suite, of sorts, is a side effect.

It doesn't work as a specific optimization tool or algorithm discovery tool. Which isn't really surprising as these are two of the few remaining 'non-mechanical' aspects of programming.
We are still in the dark ages, though. Just consider: this "bulb" has to plug into the standard 110/230V AC electrical sockets. Powering an LED is nothing like powering an incandescent bulb: you need a constant current driver delivering a precisely measured DC current that, depending on the LED, is between 300mA and (say) 1.5A. The voltage you need depends on the number of LEDs in series, but assume 3.2V per LED. If you want dimming, you need to do PWM (pulse-width modulation).

This means that inside every "bulb" like this there is a small switching power supply. And small switching power supplies that can take you from 110/230V AC to 3-24V DC are a) expensive, b) not very efficient.

Even more amusing is the "dimmable" bulb: traditional dimmers in AC circuits use triacs to effectively cut out (e.g. cut to zero) a part of the sinusoidal AC waveform. Meaning you get a chopped-up sine waveform behind the dimmer. Any switching PSU won't really notice, as long as there is enough (let's use a technical term) "oomph" left in the waveform. So, what the "dimmable" solutions do, is look at the AC waveform coming in, notice that it isn't really a sine and a part of it has been cut out, estimate how much has been cut out, and provide a PWM dimming signal to the LED driver.

Sure, it's all still better than the incandescent bulb, but it's very costly and inefficient. It also generates a lot of waste: if you throw out an incandescent bulb, it's really just some glass and a little metal. The LED "bulb" contains at least 20 electronic components and a PCB apart from the LED itself.

I think that sooner or later we will need an additional electrical standard, 24 or 48V DC with an overlaid control signal for dimming and a new standard for sockets. 110/230V simply doesn't make sense for powering single bulbs anymore.
On Firebug, when you hover the layout section, the respective section of the selected HTML element is highlighted. I use _a lot_ this feature, it is very useful, and IMHO is a must-have for a webdev tool :-)

Another feature I would like to see is a 'Disable cache', and a 'Open source code in a new tab' (the things I use more of Web Developer Tools :-) )
Yes, this is going to far. And I am not blaming the web designer for this, I am blaming the html standard that still hasn't decided whether web pages are documents or applications.

Why does it even have a scroll bar if the behavior can be redefined at will.
Merging these two tools would be by number 1 request.
Use https://github.com/syohex/emacs-git-gutter-fringe if you want the symbols in the fringe.

But sadly the Emacs mode calls git synchronously which can lead to a significant slow down when switching buffers. I hope that gets fixed.
Start, type, search results. Its had that since vista!
I used to be a Mac basher, as my first MBP gave me a lot of trouble (ended with video card recall). Then I got a beefy ThinkPad W520, which gave me even more trouble (random power-offs at least once per week). Now my work laptop is a 16GB RAM 500GB SSD 2.7GHz i7 late 2012 rMBP, I run VMware Fusion with Windows, Ubuntu and CentOS VMs, which feel faster than my w520 running Windows natively! Past lessons have taught me not to use OS X for dev besides for iOS :)

Retina display is so much better for reading papers. There is no way I'd use even a 1080p display given a choice! It has only given me minor issues so far (failed to wake up in some external display combination in rare occasions). Knock on wood :)
Viadeo - Paris, France

We are a professional social network (www.viadeo.com), leading in France and China. We have over 50 millions users. There are some great challenges ahead.
We are ramping up our efforts to improve our web app and our mobile apps (iOS/Android). That's why we are in need of some help.

We're looking for people who want to work with:
* Javascript (especially Node.JS)
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Email hrit@viadeo.com and come join our team!
> The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to.

Care to elaborate?
All your web business depends on popularity of HTTP.
> The mercury is elemental mercury which isn't very toxic, and extremely poorly absorbed on top of that.

That's fortunate. When I was a kid, we used to amuse ourselves by coating pennies with elemental mercury. Very shiny!

Of course, some organic compounds of mercury are a different story, e.g., dimethylmercury.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn
You are naive to think that if btcchina.com would lose their domain they would close shop. They would simply register a .cn or other ccTLD and continue business as usual.

"The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to."

No they cannot. For the same reason that the US cannot take the illegal drug market down, or cannot take Bittorrent down. Decentralized systems or industries (whether in the digital or real world) are very resilient.
sounds legit...
That's a deal-breaker. Don't buy this bulb. It will make everything look awful.
That reminds me a bit of the Vonnegut short story, Harrison Bergeron with some more overtly Orwellian tones.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Buying your way into the news
>Neither TDD nor types are the single answer to writing code that does what we want.

This is an oddly persistent strawman. Is there any seasoned developer who believes there is a single answer to this problem?
I did not say "is not toxic". I said "not very toxic".

The OSHA limit is 0.1 mg/m^3. A CFL has 5mg of mercury - so even if every bit of the CFL mercury stayed in a room 13x13x10 feet (which it won't since most gets absorbed by the wall of the CFL) you would still be legal. And that's for continuous exposure! Not a single event.

I can't seem to find good data on the LD50 of elemental mercury, everything is for compounds of it, but compared to everyday compounds, it's toxic - but not very.
Well I can't really tell, I've grown up knowing that eating humans is bad. It's just the way it's always been.

I've also grown up knowing that cats and dogs are not for eating. And yet, even just a hundred kilometers away, I hear Italians eat plenty of cats and even consider it normal in some areas.
You're probably righ on Woz being a bit too soft, but just to play the devil's advocate: maybe he was just thinking of the stereotypical "nerd supremacy" type of criticism, which I think we can agree on is a damaging sort of criticism.
I agree that we need a closed-circuit DC solution for households. One efficient step-down, and then we plug rechargeable (phones, laptops, etc) in, and power LED lights off it. We still need AC to transmit power to the house, and power high-juice devices, obviously.

Presumably this already exists? Any home-hackers know who's making them?
Cough... here.
Keep getting:

Failed! "rexasdsfed" may exist, try another name
Why do you doubt we're on Hacker News?
It looks fun, but the crooked over the head camera makes me sick. I mean physically sick. It screws with my sense of symmetry, my side vision and my expectations for character movement all at the same time.

I doubt raising it as an issue would mean anything, sadly. People like me must be rarer than colour-blind linux users running xmonad.
See what I wrote here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5329833

You can pick any longevity you like - it's a straight tradeoff of energy efficiency.
> Also, Even though Bitcoin cant be destroyed in a physical sense, it can still be completely devalued by litigation. The US has shown they are serious about anti-gambling and if this starts taking off, they simply need to go after the exchanges. Making it hard to buy bitcoins = BTC value goes down. Making it hard to sell (remember when pokerstars was shutdown? Everyone withdrew everything from ALL sites) and the value goes down catastrophically fast.

And if they were really serious they could 'just' devote some computing time to destroying the blockchain.

5 of the top 10 (out of the Top500) computers are in the US. If they were really serious they'd spend the money and burn the time and own the block chain.
You're right that the number who make partner has shrunk massively (and the competitiveness goes further in that being a partner is no longer as secure as it was - several of the large firms have ousted partners which would previously have been almost unheard of).

The upside (at least for those competing) is that many who don't make partner will still go on to secure corporate lawyer jobs earning six figures...
I would rather recommend chapter on deterministic concurrency in this paper: http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/par-tutorial.pdf
[In particular `par` and promises.]

This solution is quickest to debug, and most efficient. One can also use multiprocessing-like approach:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/multiprocessing.html

My last 15 years of practice indicate that other approaches lead to unnecessary complication, and are less likely to be effective (threads and semaphores in particular.)
Maths is wrong

Where have you deducted the expected ROI on the money you've invested on the asset?

Also the numbers are to high, not many rooms are on 6 hours a day.

Electricity is actually a fairly insignificant for lighting/ power use by consumers in general. People like these things because they are easy fixes, not because they achieve much.

But I'd say the real benefits is in business and cost reductions in labour replacing light bulbs. It's the longevity not the reduced power use that has the value in commerce.
I'm not saying Gowalla originally copied Foursquare, but this blog post got me wondering -

What are some notable examples of a "copycat" startup actually overtaking the original "innovator" startup? Because I'm having trouble thinking of any off the top of my head. (And I'm not talking about cases like Facebook overtaking MySpace or Google overtaking Yahoo where a fundamentally different company overtook a long-dominant incumbent)

Foursquare beat out Gowalla, Google+ never had a chance against Facebook, Groupon beat out Living Social, Pinterest beat out all its copycats, Square has managed to stay ahead of the competition, same with Dropbox, Evernote, Y Combinator, Airbnb, LinkedIn, etc. I could go on but you get my point.

There seems to be a lesson in here somewhere...
eww, way too many ads on the page, including right between the results and the discussion! also simply refuses to return results for "test", but I seem to get real results for "pope" (I was trying something newsworthy). I'm not sure/it's not clear what 'custom' search is going on.
Agreed with a lot of the article up until: "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN".

This is likely the result of spending too much time inside a Microsoft cocoon and has no idea that most of the outside world isn't built on Azure, or even windows servers. The only thing Azure is going to win at is being the default/preferred cloud provider for Microsoft MVPs and other VS.NET devs primarily based on a Microsoft tech stack.
The electricity hour rate will probably vary in the next 10 years. In some parts of Europe the cost will go up by more than 25% in the next 2 years.

There is also the long term benefit of lowering global consumption of electricity: probably less CO₂ rejected in atmosphere, and decreasing power outage risk in regions badly interconnected with the grid.
> One day, Mr. Shark sells 100,000 BTC all at once on the Mt. Gox market. He cashes in at BTC's high price, then BTC crashes.

Then Mr. Stingray buys cheap bitcoin for 5mil and the story goes on.

And small fish like us tag along for the ride, trying to figure out when to buy and when to sell.

I thought that's exactly how stock market works, and commodities market and every market that people with money use for "investment". Plus sometimes some ridiculous rules about selling or buying just before or after making positive or negative hype that helps to punish 3% (my guess) of most obvious cases when that happens.
Hadn't been planning it, but it sounds like a very sensible idea! Added an issue in GitHub which you can follow if you like: https://github.com/DataTables/VisualEvent/issues/26
There are also official SDKs for Windows Azure in Java, Python, JavaScript and PHP. You don't need to be a .NET developer to think it's a swell platform to develop for.
You omitted "confirm your DNA and get a rectal exam".
there is conceptionally no support for functionality akin to noscript (as in the firefox addon, not the chromium plugin with less functionality), request policy, etc. even adblock works better in firefox.

allowing these plugins is a decision that also has drawbacks. the browser will need to support synchronous callbacks (i.e. to possibly block http requests). these can block the browser, something chromium plugins cannot do (at least so easily).
24 (or 48) volts is still too high - so you would anyway need a power supply.

And go too low on the voltage and the wires become so large as to be impractical.

These types of smart active electronics are getting cheaper and cheaper. I really don't see much need to eliminate them.
Yes, I agree.

In fact I can't see how distro incompatibilities or fragmentation affects a desktop user when you're using one distro. Icaza use case is far for the average desktop use case I think.

I'm both Ubuntu (Dell) and Fedora (Dell) user, and I don't have/suffer any of the problems described in the post. I'm a developer and I install new packages/tools from time to time, with no problems.
Top500 computers could have done this sort of attack when CPU and/or GPU mining was all the hype, but now with FPGAs and ASICs, the hardware required to have an impact is too specialized for any sort of general-purpose computing.
Errors in Conceptual Design
I can't think of anything worse than having Rupert Murdoch involved in the education of future generations. Does anyone think this man has any intentions other than pure control over the psyche of a generation? He has proven his intentions with Fox News (an "entertainment" channel) and now we're going to let him into the schools?

If anything, this should be a wake up call for a competitor to rise to the occasion and ensure he does not establish control over this market.
There's something called the 51% attack.

The attacker generates a blockchain that's larger than the real blockchain. That prevents any transactions being confirmed. To do this the attacker needs as much computing power as the rest of the Bitcoin economy, and they need to want to spend money to destroy Bitcoin. (Because they'd make more money either mining or double spending).
And a work visa.
> "Profanity detected. Message cannot be sent"

Seriously?
I'd strongly recommend any of Cafe del Mar's music 2000's-era music. It's very mellow and ambient, and there's a lot of it.
I don't know for this brand, but there are Phillips or Toshiba LED light bulbs in mall for years. (caveat : not as cheap)
Friendster and Myspace. Friendster had the lead, but wasn't that long-dominant.

Edit: Also, just found this:
http://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-markets-where-the-...
App::GitGot, tmux and Lotsa Laziness
Different personalities all right. Recall the Ig Nobel Prize-winning observations of mallard necrophilia; https://moeliker.wordpress.com/the-duck/
Yeah, there is a simple trie that checks for common profanity words. I'm sure we can improve it. :)
How painful then to see it called "magic" and read "I don't know how or why this works [...] wonder why we don't teach math the way"

That doesn't sound like any kind of understanding is involved...
Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard. Particularly, large enterprises. They have created nice lock-ins too. Majority of large enterprises (not just in US but around world) have Windows stack meaning majority of tech team consists of .net folks with all the .net tools like visual studio, MSDN licenses etc. And with Azure, you add cloud computing too. So it's likely that all these big enterprises are going to use Azure with their fat checquebooks.

P.S. I haven't used Azure platform yet so I can't comment on product quality of Azure
We are experimenting with some like that. We'll be glad to work with you on this.
A very cool engineering assignment from Tel Aviv University
Martin Fowler: Introduction to NoSQL [youtube]
These things pop up about every six months. Some have a USP, others like this one, don't.
X10 has dimmer modules. It's basically a dimmer with remote control.
Couple questions:

* Why bother using a trie?

* Why bother filtering profanity?
If you're going to give people a unique URL to give out, then can we have non unique group names? I couldn't find a relevant group name that wasn't already taken, so resorted to mashing the keyboard
I wonder if the Engine behind it is Open Source or could we use this services from other browsers like Firefox?

This is beneficial for
Getting pass Firewall restriction, from China Firewall to Office Internal Firewalls.
Speed up Internet connection, especially in places where the shared internet is extremely slow. ( Office or Public Computers )

While i am already using my own VPN for this purpose. It is much slower compared to a normal internet collection if your VPS is not located close to you.
About the "only 10% of the world value", top-down estimates rarely work =)

Working backwards (bottom-up) usually gives a more realistic estimate. Especially if you base this on existing data.

Oh sure, you can back your wallet.dat.

It also can be copied over the internet by a malicious sw, unlike physical money.
I would love to use this service, but I demand the freedom to bitch and moan to my friends using whatever cuss words I fucking feel like.
I agree. I really can't imagine him not having some sort of ulterior motive.
You can improve it by getting rid of it.
Penguins' coats are colder than surrounding air
Depending on the organization, this is either acceptable or not, encouraged or not. And usually in every organization, if you're going to do the talking, you need to be one that everyone respects. Otherwise (again, depending on the organization), it can be a moment when everyone turns against you.

In especially toxic cultures, you need to be careful. It's unfortunate but true if you ever find yourself in one. Get out, get out fast if you are.
Creating Customer Rockstars: The Ultimate Marketing Gem
If you look from an international perspective, there are companies started in Europe that did much better in the european markets than the "original" product. The end result is pretty much that the "original" had to buy out the clone.

For example Groupon buying MyCityDeal

The Samwer brothers are experts at this http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/ins...
I was surprised by what names were already taken. Seemed like there was a bug in the name check rather than the name actually being taken.
[Show HN] ShipmentApp - share and review your designs
this is just a geeky experiment. We can turn it off if needed, ofcourse.
Thank you, having lived in a country with an episode of Hyperinflation have taught me a lot about how that works.

Even though the monetary expansion of BtC is limited, I think we may see other events that have not have happened with 'real money'
Sandboxing is utterly broken. If you want a real hellride try to load 'sandbox unsafe' Audio Units (read: every non-Apple AU, though many Apple AUs aren't safe either) into a sandboxed application.

There's a temporary entitlement that should allow this. The only problem is, that this entitlement simply disables sandboxing midway through app initialization and the NSUserDefaults system becomes unusable after that.

See last post in: https://devforums.apple.com/thread/155950?tstart=0
> Failed! "test" may exist, try another name
> Failed! "another name" may exist, try another name
> Failed! "i just did" may exist, try another name
this is a bug! We are looking into it
Sad to say, school will force it out of 'em.

Sad to say, school is necessary to function in society.
The piece isn't really about that though. Despite being an extreme claim, it's really just a tangential opinion. I think the piece can stand pretty well even if you disagree with this, but I would certainly be interested in a separate article on the topic.
http://groups.gaglers.com/r/EM3m/