skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm ok with Mozilla's stance on this. I'd be ok with them raising anti-trust issues over this at DoJ, too.
I agree that DST works well in the summer, but let's not bother switching back in the winter. We would get all of the advantages of DST, without the expense of time changes. It really would be better to have the last glimpse of sun at the end of the day work day during winter.
Saskatchewan is on to something here!
Yeah, let's pick one of the things that computers do much better than humans and make a captcha based on it!

It's astounding, I'm not even sure how to offend them, since I don't think any sort of insult is enough for whoever "designed" this.
> After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. It's possible I'm just projecting because of my own experience, but it seems like many of the more influential members of the .NET ecosystem have gone on to do other things.

That's not entirely true. Pretty much the entire ASP.net MVC stack has now been open-source. Entity Framework is also open-source.

I agree, 3rd party OSS ecosystem is much smaller than Java.
No one is forcing anyone to do anything. They are providing more opportunities for women to discover that they might like engineering -- more reasons not to write it off before they realize that it's worth fighting for.
I agree with what you're saying, but without a proper implementation outside of Windows, the CLR is currently a place where great languages go to die. Mono is functional, but is basically unsupported (for everything but mobile).
"You may have misgivings about buying this game, but see how all of your peers are enjoying this; don't you want to be cool like them?"
There are ways in the .NET framework to read an entire file with one line: File.ReadAllText("file.txt"). And the System.Net.WebClient class provides ways to make simple HTTP calls in much fewer lines than WebRequest does.

Likewise, Python has ways for interacting directly with streams.
Not even image recognition. The chessboard is nicely marked-up with relevant classes (e.g. 'bishop') for each piece; would be very easy to automatically solve. However, as others have said, since it's such a narrow target, it's probably not worth cracking.
You're right. It was poorly thought out and unnecessarily inflammatory. My apologies.
That wouldn't be much different than asking if you can use Chrome inside the PC Firefox. When the browser is the OS itself, then you can't ask for that.
It seems that google's position is firmly that this agreement is not an admission that they infringed any patents. That said, it's a pretty funny statement coming from an entity that just paid for patent licensing. The tricky thing about the situation is that the details of the agreement aren't clear enough to say who "won", and personally, it looks to me more like a stalemate. Even stalemate might be putting it strongly, as it implies that they are in some kind of opposition, which may not be the case.
I keep hearing that there are better options... but I haven't found one which is personally better for me. I'd love to hear suggestions if you have the time.

I think the biggest problem for me isn't some attachment to Windows Server (I much prefer working on a Linux server), or some misplaced love for WebForms (ick!), but the C# language in general.

There are a lot of great dynamic language setups on Linux (Rails, various Python stacks, etc) which aren't bad or anything... but I always find working in a dynamic language to be a bit of a hindrance. I've been writing a multiplayer game server in Go, and I can't even begin to list the hours of work compile-time type tests have saved me during early development as I constantly refactor. But on the other hand, I wouldn't want to write a large "business" style web-app in Go (my day job), which really doesn't have a standards library tailored for it.

I also get the feeling that the dynamic language web-stacks suffer from relatively poor performance compared to the CLR, and for some of the clients I work with who need to do some fairly complex non-database processing, this wouldn't be a great thing. Maybe this concern is unfounded though.

Perhaps Java is the closest match to .NET, both in style and in spirit. But having done a fair amount of Java development for Android, Java just feels so clumsy and clunky... The language isn't as nice, the tools aren't as nice, and the standard library just doesn't compare in terms of letting my express myself quickly and easily.

When one of my clients needs a web-app, I always go .NET. These projects won't ever be scaling to millions of users, so server licensing really isn't an issue. On the other hand, there will be lots of direction changes no matter the amount of planning, so static typing can be a God-send with the safety blanket it provides. And C# really lets me write clean code more quickly than in anything else I've worked with.

If I we're creating a product for a start-up, I probably wouldn't go with it... licensing costs would be an issue. But then again, if I was running a start-up, hopefully it wouldn't be a relatively boring business-app that was best suited to something like .NET. And if I were creating a product for a huge number of users, it'd be worth pouring in the development time to have a super high performance back-end in a language separate from the quick-to-add-features-to Ruby front-end.

But for my use case, I just haven't found a better option yet. I'd love some suggestions though, because I'm not a big fan of Microsoft these days and wouldn't mind being less at-mercy of their platform. Maybe my concerns are unfounded though, and I'm just stuck in what I know, but I do branch out a lot for personal projects.
Why do you have the font size so big?
You can build it anytime you want. It doesn't make any sense, though.
I'd hazard a guess that most people posting on a chess forum know the rules.

And as somebody else pointed out, maybe they don't want new topics asking what are the possible moves of a queen.
Success is a result. No one can control results. In fact, the better you are, the less control you tend to have over results, because you relinquish control and reliability in favor of high-risk, high-expectancy plays.

(As I get older, however, I'm starting to realize that some of that risk-seeking is pathological. I'd rather have a stable lifestyle business where I can do work that's good for the world and live, reliably, quite well... than a 10% shot at a $200m acqhire welfare check that leaves the rest of the team hosed.)

I wrote about this before anyone knew who I was: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/stop-writing-...
It seems to me to depend on what side of the world you land Dev or Ops. Ops is much easier on the OSS side. RDPing in to a hundred boxes to click a button is the height tediousness, the oss alternative is running a script(and the tools that can make that target all one hundred at once). On the Dev side there is nothing that matches C# on CLR. Java isn't conceptually different but it is missing so many niceties as to make it distasteful. Scala or Clojure maybe, but they don't have the richer environment that C# does (certainly not a reason to dimiss them out of hand.)
lichess.org is a game server, and supports real-time playing. The ping is a critical information when you play fast games, it helps to diagnose lagging when it happens.
I have also been working for the last 6 months with C# at the office and I was reading the article nodding all the time. Working in C# is a good experience and you have the feeling that it's an upgraded version of Java.

However, for me is still boring. It's not easy to explain and I am pretty sure is very subjective but I feel C# lacks of soul. In the sense that programming in C# isn't as fun as programming in Scheme or Python. Maybe is just me, but I don't use C# outside of my work.
guess they won't be returning to iOS then...
Regardless of whether Google "won" or not, it does look like VP8 will be a much more approachable codec thanks to being open source, and because it doesn't require video makers to pay MPEG-LA license fees whenever they want to make money from their videos. I'd think at the very least professional camera makers would be interested in supporting it. From that point of view, I think the article is right.
You can repeat this until you're blue in the face, but it simply isn't true.

The game is intended to be played online. You share resources with neighbouring cities. Crime spills over into your city from others. You can work together on collaborative projects (international airports etc.). It's not MMO but it's not single player either.

I believe in some early interviews Maxis also referred to some computational work being offloaded to EA servers but I can't find these now. They might not have gone through with it, but it was certainly in the original plan.
It is on a chess forum.
I consider it evidence that when some punk figures out how to make a black hole, we're done for. No reason necessary.
> So the Freedmen were forced to be tenants of the white landowners — planting the cotton seed, tending the crop, being responsible for everything produced by their small patch of land. But after all the work was done, they had to hand over the proceeds of their labor to the landowners and receive just a “share” of the “crop” — usually no more than half.

Sounds like the VC model?
I don't mean this to be derogatory, but ASP.NET MVC, as great as it is, was not particularly innovative when it was originally written. Entity Framework is an ORM, and by definition not particularly innovative.

Why isn't something like Cassandra or Hadoop written using .NET? It's the Windows requirement that makes ideas like that die on the vine.

Shit, there are more interesting systems built using Erlang/OTP than there are for .NET.

Edit: RavenDB is probably the closest thing to new tech that's currently happening on .NET, and it's because Oren Eini is one of the few innovators left in the ecosystem.
I live in India. Don't own a startup but have been studying the market. A lot of things make India tough:
1. People are taught not to pay - When computers started proliferating India, it was almost 100% piracy. Apart from OEM bundled Windows it still is. TPB in India is the standard. When you ask consumers for money, they want a physical good because virtual should be free just like it has ever been on TPB. Apps do not sell.
2. Insane justice system - If someone just stole what you did and started selling it, it would take twenty years to to get justice. And that may not even happen if that person is influential.
3. Strange tax laws - The indirect taxation policy has loopholes. People can steal taxes, play bribes and remain a monopoly. It is not everyone's cup of tea, but those that are good at it are very rich in India. A lot of the rest promote leaving India as a good option. Fighting is also not what everyone can do.

Having said all this, a lot of start ups are bubbling in India. Maybe a few years down the line, doing a safe and legal software business would be as profitable in India as in the States even for the middle class.
Thanks for an opinionated and interesting post.

"You can't make design decisions or anything else, because each release is to take what Red Hat puts out, scratch off the Red Hat label, and re-publish as CentOS."

That is the stated purpose of the CentOS project. See the CentOS Overview box on the CentOS Web site. As an end user with a desktop PC, I find that limited scope and predictability reassuring.
Because almost no one actually does that, despite it existing, and tools and documentation for it on the net are very sparse.
Option 4: they do nothing
Is Pertino networks affiliated with Venture? How? Parent company?
> * Often you actually need pixel-perfection in display, which SVG isn't really built for (hence the S) and you'll just end up drawing 1-pixel wide lines in SVG form.

Actually you might find it interesting that SVG supports media queries so you can include multiple presentations of an image for different sizes and even make special cases of some sizes and go for pixel perfection for them. The thing that makes your argument(s) stand true is that SVG support is horrendous (even Inkscape doesn't let you leverage many of SVG's powerful features, e.g. media queries, and worse yet, bloats your SVGs with meaningless cruft).
I don't think a chess AI would offer much benefits to execution time with a brute force that is that small.
I don't understand why so many comments are painting this as bad. Who cares if Google paid a shitload of money to MPEG-LA. The main point is, VP8 is now free for anyone to use, for any reason. Wasn't that the goal?
One very important difference I forgot...

If you like to configure everything from the CLI, Debian's core configuration files are much nicer than RHEL's. Compare, for example, "/etc/network/interfaces" as opposed to "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/*". This difference is enough for me to have X11 on my desktop just to be able to run "system-config-network" - In RHEL5, because on RHEL6 is either editing those awful config files or using the even more awful NetworkManager... bleh!
alright, i was (kinda) joking. but i don't think that the guitar playing was the unique selling value of nirvana. the song writing was stellar though.
Download NuoDB 1.0.1 for free
The original ARM RISC design did away with Microcode, with the chip executing instructions directly, although I think it might have crept back in since then

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Instruction_se...
Maybe someone mentioned this but what if the reason more women don't go into CS/programming is more to do with discrimination from other women and not men? Perhaps women feel they won't be considered 'womanly' as defined by females?
Very appropriate for a chess server. Would like to have GO captcha too! :-)
iOS is at 35-40% marketshare.. so there's no chance of an anti-trust suit working. Mozilla would just be wasting resources by attempting it at this point.
At the least, the HTTP response time overhead might be a reason to use an AI.
It's a real technical "win", but it doesn't look that way. It's just a marketing problem now. Google needs to spend their resources pushing VP8 into everything now.
All they're doing there is making their browser less relevant on the desktop. It's an expectation now that your phone and desktop should stay synced so that article you were reading on your phone is right there on your desktop too, and that bookmark you saved on your desktop is available whilst you're on the bus - this is just going to cripple Firefox further.
Blocking bruteforce is 'easy', just make any attempts after X attempts be void for the given board/ip

For the humans, just give another board (and add a time delay)
The fact that it's a chessboard captcha with no relevant target behind it proably outweights even the satisfaction of cracking it. "Hey, I broke the chessboard captcha" "You did WHAT? I loved that thing!"...
The real win will come if Google is able to have VP8 adopted as an MPEG standard, like the article states.
>for some people that don't know how to play chess it would be harder
Opps.. I didn't realize.
I found a scan of the article in french:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Franklin-...

The article starts in the "E C O N O M I E" section.

(note: the shape of the printed lowercase s looks like an f)

Don't be surprised that the he was able to write in French, as educated people of that time knew French, much as educated people today know English. Moreover he was ambassador to France during 1776–1785.
It's like negotiating with a terrorist.
How is that different from having two passwords or a password of double the length? Worse, people may put in the first part of email as username defeating the whole purpose.
> Everytime I see someone talking about "unlimited" something my spider sense ticks off.

Sure. For some values of unlimited it's purely an academic question. But if you can scale automatically to handle double load (which is a more real concern) chances are you can scale further without any other changes.

And yes, AWS, Azure and AppHarbour all have some of the licensing issues handled for you, but that can also be clearly seen when faced with the costs.

Again, I' not saying that nobody should ever use a Windows server for anything. I use it myself. I just say that I can see several reasons why people would chose to avoid it.
This goes even further than the flat/gradients debate and will also be useful for people who'd like to deeply customize bootstrap.

Customizing Bootstrap has always been a pain (and I'm not the only one to think this, in the words of @mdo : those who want to use Bootstrap as a bootstrap kind of get the short end of the stick), I'm very happy to see that they're looking to make this easier.
Apple filed for a similar patent and I wrote about it in 2007:
https://mikecane.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/oy-apple-backsided...
"And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result."

that's the scientific approach! Never simply trust your own eyes but repeat the experiment :-)
Am I the only one who thinks people are overreacting? Seems like the whole Internet is on fire over a game, even HN is infected. Servers had a little trouble, but what I'm hearing it's stable now. So why not just wait or buy the game a few days later and be fine?

And if you're really convinced the online requirement is just glorified DRM and EA is evil anyway, don't buy the game. Problem solved! There are really more important things to worry about.
Microsoft is trying too hard to make C# answer to every single technology trend, adding dynamic type, asynchronous methods, etc. In most cases you wind up with a working but much worse alternative to the real thing. For example, here's how you create an anonymous function that returns a string in C#:

(new Func<string>(() =>
{
return "foo";
}))();

That's pretty awful and as a result you rarely see anyone doing stuff like that, whereas with JavaScript it's used regularly. But for C# it's another checkbox that they can say they support.

C# should stick with trying to be the best statically typed compiled object oriented language.
Yea the new buttons just don't feel right. In the case of checkbox (button toolbar style) it is quite hard to tell which one is selected. Maybe they should aim for a more Rdio/Dropbox style solution. Mostly flat except for buttons and input elements.
And will only become a problem when you reach a huge scale. If by that time it is still a problem then maybe your problem is not having a good enough business model.
sim city 4 had exactly the same mechanics in single player.

There really is nothing to say in their defense, even if they DID design the game to be multiplayer, they could of done it in a decentralized way and let peers inter-connect. They did it this way for control. Do not defend them.
> Who the heck is targeting Github and why?

Typically large services are targeted by some some form of cyber-criminal. As an example only, if the Russian Business Network[1]* were attempting to extort money from github they could use a DDOS and go away when paid (for a while).

This happens to some larger media sites during large events such as the Olympics[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Business_Network
[2] http://news.techworld.com/security/3309917/london-olympics-cio-claims-immunity-from-ddos-attacks/

*Their MO is more towards identity theft
Brilliant building of software. Less than brilliant copy.

I would change

Black plays; checkmate in one!
This is a chess CAPTCHA.
Click on the board to make your move,
and prove you are human.

to

This is a chess CAPTCHA...
To prove that you are human,
click on a black piece, then
click on the only destination
square that will checkmate.

I really don't mean to nitpick, but took me a minute to figure out what to do. Sometimes the thing that makes the biggest difference for us programmers is not our communication with our compiler but our communication with our users.

Great job. Thanks to you, I just announced I won't be ready for brunch for another half hour. <Refresh> Sigh.
It's mainly the nature of the game. With World of Warcraft you kind of know what you are getting into. But pretend you are just a dude walking around BestBuy, you pick up SimCity on launch day to bring back fond childhood memories. You take it home, install it on your computer, and it basically does not work (with no explanations besides it can't connect and sometimes worse then that) for 4 days. It was just an unbelievably bad launch for something that doesn't really use online that much in the end.
"Rosenblatt queried the audience to find out how many people were iOS users, and a majority of hands went up. By contrast, when he asked how many of them were suffering, just a few hands surfaced."

Do people expect a full browser in Firefox for iOS or a skin atop the UIWebView? If its the latter (which, as I understand it, is what Chrome for iOS is) then is Firefox for iOS really important on any level?
Given a sane language and a sane exposed API, it's not difficult to limit what the remote code can do. It's just that bolting a software-based isolation layer ("sandbox") on top of something existing can be expected to yield a few holes in the process. If I were to use anything existing, it would be something like Lua. Just strip away the standard library API and replace it with something strictly under your control.
Like Google Chrome Frame does in Internet Explorer, you mean? I would like for that to be available on other browsers too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_Frame
Vinylfy is now 100% FREE
There are no such images in the article now.
Fyi, top nav menu doesn't work on nexus 7
Firefox was on iOS?

It's only available by turning allowing "dangerous" apps on kindle (not via the kindle store) and I see it's in Google Play but wasn't for quite a while. I love these "open" platforms.

Now that VP8 is licensed by MPEG-LA I guess it's time for Firefox to drop support for it. Oh, and I'd like Firefox to take the same approach to fonts — don't display anything in proprietary fonts.
thanks for the feedback, I will apply the suggested change soon.
In not-even-especially northerly places that would mean during deep-winter the sun doesn't rise until 8-8:30am.
From my understanding, there also was/is a loophole that allowed squatters to hold on to a name without cost for a period. Once it rolled off, they were able to grab it again at no cost. Don't recall all of the details or whether the loophole was closed, but at one time it powered a lot of the squatting activity.
Why Does A Horse Need A Full-Body Suit?
Fascinating despite being way over my head. Amazing to see math of such complexity done without a computer - we're so spoiled today.
Is it just me or has github been down a lot in the later months (moreso than a year ago)? DDoS or otherwise, it doesn't inspire confidence, especially for paid accounts (which I considered but ultimately decided to go with another solution)
It's pretty safe to assume most large companies pay very low/zero corporate taxes. Saying that this giveaway will make EA more profitable is misleading.

Oddly enough, according to EA's financial statements their income after tax has been higher than their income before tax for at least the past four years. Not sure how that works, perhaps tax rebates or writing off losses?

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AEA&fstype=ii&#...
Mozilla had an app named 'Firefox Home' in the App Store. It allowed you to view your desktop Firefox bookmarks, tabs, and history - which it would then display in a regular webview. Mozilla pulled the app last year.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/01/mozilla-pulls-firefox-hom...
Do you want to share with us how this works?