skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With those two (Windows and Office natch) cash cows a sufficiently tech-savvy bonobo could CEO Microsoft and turn a profit each and every quarter. Heck, even I could. The momentum that behemoth has must be unnatural. I don't think that this (quarterly profit or whatever) should be the metric by which Ballmer is judged. He should be judged on percentage of penetration into various market segments or something like that. So: consoles, yay; mobile, boo; desktop, yay (you can't beat a good monopoly); server, not so much; media forays, boo; net search, ho-hum; and so forth ...
Git? tig
BRCK – the easiest, most reliable way to connect to the Internet
Can you please mention what you find funny with this ? It will take sometime to find the funnier text from the submitted link.
I recently had a similar idea (i.e. plotting contentment) related to keeping employees engaged / detecting how events at work affected the general mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5646466
This post's great as it shows a really good way to model that data (e.g. their use of different colours for days of the week helps to determine if you had a good day for a special reason or if that day people are generally in a better mood).
Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia
Slightly OT, Is it possible to have a web application (using popular tech like RoR, PHP etc.) that cannot be cracked by anyone ?
The absolute number of things done "right" or "wrong" doesn't matter so much.

Many small "right things" will not balance out even a single, massive "wrong thing".

Keep in mind that the single "wrong thing" can in turn spawn new problems of its own, like a tarnished reputation and uncertainty among consumers.

It should be quite clear now, although it was pretty clear during the preview releases, that the UI changes were overwhelmingly bad. Even if such problems are fixed with a subsequent update, there are enough people who still just won't trust it, based on the poor initial experiences.
MadEye - Remote Pair Programming built with meteor and Ace editor
I've always thought of him as "Steve 'why do I still have my job?' Balmer".
Yes. The full facts are amazing.

Here's a simple version that I like to spread around. (http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html)
They've obviously got some issues that require professional help. This doesn't seem that far off from stalkers who feel like they are part of a person's life, and turn nasty when rejected (even though they never were a part of the person's life).
I thought so too until I looked at MS's number over his tenure. Amazing growth and lots of money returned to shareholders. They may not get the press but they are minting cash and entering new businesses every year. They have over a dozen $1billion+ a year businesses.

Oh, and Bill Gates wants him there. And Ballmer is a major shareholder to boot.
I have $200 of yours with me. I initiate the process of giving the $200 to you, like I take out my wallet. Then I stop before I actually give the money to you, I put my wallet back and then I tell you "Hey you know what now I owe you only $180!"

This is what it looks like - http://i.imgur.com/GIaP5O2.png

Does that look right?
That assumes:

That artists will keep their tools at the latest version at all times - they don't. Often, they're still using a version of Photoshop three upgrades old. At that point, Creative Cloud is a lot more expensive.

That they get paid in advance. They don't, always. Particularly if you're creating something for consumers, you get paid after creation. However, if your tools have gone away, you can't create, which means you can't get paid, which means you can't buy the tools, which means... Yep, you're screwed.

That all artists are really good with money and financial planning. They aren't. I know you'll probably say "well then, they deserve to have no tools". Sadly, I've never seen that artistic ability directly correlates to business sense, and I'd rather that brilliant artists don't end up stopping producing work I enjoy, regardless.

On that note, that dry periods never go on for longer than the old purchase price of Photoshop / duration of dry spell * monthly cost of Creative Cloud. If a dry spell does go on for that long, even if you saved up the purchase price of Photoshop and dilligently pay it month after month, you're screwed.
I'm surprised that he even got a response from Google. I thought that the only way to get to a person was to post on HN. </sarcasm> ;-)
Pass me whatever you're smoking, bud.

> I doubt anyone at Microsoft is that upset about Windows 8's reception

You are wrong. I mean, I'm sure there are people at Microsoft who don't care. Windows 8 is a failure so far. They need to salvage it.

This teenage attitude of it being "weak" to fix it and "cave" to consumer demands doesn't cut it when you're talking about a multi-billion dollar product completely failing in a publicly traded company. Microsoft has a legal obligation to its investors to fix this problem.

> but I don't see any significant reversal of direction

Again, you're wrong.

They're releasing a patch to add in boot to desktop and reintroduce the start button. The only thing they aren't undoing yet is giving a traditional start menu instead of the start screen.

Consumers have spoken clearly; they don't like or want Windows 8. It doesn't matter if it's better in your opinion. It's a product for the masses. It's a product for Mom & Dad, they need to be able to use it. And that means that abandoning all the established visual dialogue is a stupid mistake.

The lack of sales has shown that, and it's why Microsoft is reversing direction and releasing this patch.

There's a reason this news is being covered in the Financial Times; because investors see lack of Windows 8 sales and they get very unhappy.
"short-sighted consumers"

You lost me here.

If Msofts strategic trajectory needs to be explained to consumers to justify Windows 8's existence, they fucked up.

Windows 8 should have been a pleasure to use straight out of the box.
The fifth amendment only covers criminal caes - in fact, technically only covers felonies. The implication for this case is that the lawyers can refuse to answer questions with an assertion of their fifth amendment rights, and if and when they should ever be tried for those crimes then in that case it would be forbidden for the prosecution to mention that they did that or draw any inferences from it. There is no such protection in a civil case, however. You have no right to "not answer questions because it might help the other guys who are suing me win."

I am not a lawyer this is not legal advice, etc etc, but there are other examples in civil cases of where this kind of thing can be used against you. I have a lawyer friend who does personal injury cases, and one of the first things lawyers do in those cases is send spoilation letters to the insurance companies demanding that they preserve any evidence. Absent this, it's common practice for insurance companies to have totaled vehicles destroyed, for example. If they destroy any evidence after receiving a spoilation letter, then in the lawsuit the jury will be instructed to assume that the destroyed evidence showed things in as favorable a light as possible to the other party.
Are you saying that the people around you made being smart a bad thing and also are responsible for you to regress from a genius developer to an average one?
Adding a conditional ("do I answer or do I proxy?") on every DNS query -- and there are many -- is going to introduce enough latency to be noticed unless you throw a lot of gear at it.

Hm, why? Any modern CPU is blazingly fast. Writing it in Ruby probably wouldn't be smart, but Python + PyPI or Lua + LuaJIT would easily get within a factor of 10x of C.
Interesting point, that does make sense.
New Solar Energy-Generating Spheres Harvest Energy from Moonlight
Connecting the dots between beliefs: an example from housing policy
Because man provides access to the Unix manual? It's a commentary indeed when the man pages on a Macintosh are better.
Microsoft will add features to the UI and give users more time to learn Metro. The comparison to New Coke is a good one, the analysis weak. New Coke gave CocaCola the cover for switching from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup across the product line in the US. "Classic" was a new product.

Metro is the right direction. It will just take time for businesses to catch up. And now the narrative will be about Microsoft's improvements.
International transfers are not that simple. PayPal is not a bank in USA and cannot directly transfer money to India, they have to work with a bank. A bank is required to convert the USD to INR when transferring it. Your problem is not with PayPal, and any competitor would do the same as required by law.
The Prehistory of QWERTY
Someone needs to ask this question to the likes of Stripe. Why is their fabulous service limited only to US/UK? Is it laws? Is it fraud? What prevents them from extending their service to other countries?
I had the same backwards number on windows chrome
Only if the server is switched off and disconnected from the network.
I'd put it other way round: If software is infringing on someone's patents then it is illegal to license it under GPL3.
"doesn't change its logo and completely redevelop its entire web presence so that for the first time ever its entire product line-up is consistent unless it has really, really carefully thought through its plans"

Maybe it should have thought through those plans before deciding to rebrand everything based on an unproven user-interface design?
Ask HN: Accept contributions without unit tests?
Code is valueable, no question.

Now additionally several projects have and need unit tests to be better prepared for steady growth, refactorings, more contributors etc.

But would you define a policy which allows contributions (like pull requests) only if they've unit tests included?
Is "stealing" really the right word for this?
These authors also published "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history" in Nature 2007, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/abs/nature06... .
Well, first they have to pay the defense lawyers for their time. It's not a lot, really, but enough to compensate them. Then he stripped them of various legal defenses by finding them to be party to fraud upon the court. And he accused them of "moral turpitude" which could get them disbarred. And he sent a copy of this order to every judge they have a case before. And to every bar association. So ALL of them can go after them independently. Then he referred them for a criminal investigation, mentioning RICO. Oh, and he pointed out how they said they paid no taxes and have all these shells and mystery trusts in a tax haven, so he called in the IRS to investigate, too.

So they have to face this all over again in front of every single judge where they have a case, with every bar association they're a part of. All while facing the feds AND the IRS.

This is akin to being stripped naked and thrown to the wolves, except that Judge Wright didn't stop with wolves, he looked up every carnivore in the country and gave it a dinner invitation.
A recursive acronym with a termination condition.
What would you do if PayPal wasn't in India?
I had CS5 Production Suite for Windows. I had to change my editing rig to OS X but at the time CS 6 had already come out and Adobe only was doing the OS-switching on the current version of the release of their software. So, they got me, and I had to do the creative cloud for $70/month (I didn't want to commit for the year).

I'm now waiting for the Final Cut Pro X/Motion to go on sale again, and wil be paying a one time fee of $250-$350 for Apple's editing solution. (I'm hoping I can get by on FCP, since the price is definitely appealing).

So, it might be "less hassle" or not...but it's definitely better for predictable revenues selling a monthly/yearly subscription, especially with the lack of tangible competition for some of the products.
New techniques applicable to selected NP-hard problems
//they saw the law as an opportunity to screw vendors.//

Precisely! It would be in PayPal's interest if people keep the money in their PayPal account because they don't pay any interest while they themselves can earn an interest on that sum. Now that RBI forces them to clear the account by the end of the day, they resort to whatever means they can make an extra buck.
You might be right - like I said, I think they will try to smooth the desktop-metro split, which was handled clumsily in Windows 8. Again, I think it's a start of a long transition for Microsoft (and the industry in general) and so I don't think it is surprising that there were rough patches.

As far as the "consumers have spoken", perhaps they have, but I don't advocate Microsoft staying the course out of some teenage idea of not admitting failure. I advocate it because the potential OS that could evolve from the foundation started with Windows 8 is the only feasible long-term option if Microsoft is to remain competitive over the next ten years.

Consumers are short-sighted, and currently the problem for Microsoft is, in a nutshell, maintaining legacy support gracefully while continuing to progress towards the new paradigm.
I've seen so many posts about interview rants, including one I wrote myself, that I feel like the problem lies in the higher demand than supply of positions, and that interviews, not matter what bad feedback they seem to give, aren't that poorly designed.
> "Little did I know, this was just the beginning of this campaign of harassment and cyberstalking," said Clayworth

Although the ex-girlfriend was responsible for the initial breakin, email spoofing, and posting of pictures, does the teacher know for sure she's really responsible for the continuing campaign of harassment and cyberstalking. Perhaps someone else is taking advantage of the opportunity for anonymity by supplementing her efforts.

Some people who harass do it anonymously, keeping themselves well hidden. This often also entails watching and monitoring the target closely. When they do say something publicly, it will have two possible meanings so it's all deniable. Often, they'll use their positions of influence to implicitly encourage others to do the hands-on dirty work of slagging publicly.
No, it contains no news that isn't readily available on other sites, but it has a linkbait title targeted at the clueless.
I'm ok with this because it means those newcomers will be forced to learn on other tools. Maybe this will weaken Adobe's chokehold on web developers.

I welcome the day I don't have to use photoshop just because that's what the designer used.
Honest question: what is wrong with the built-in gitk and git-gui?
Whoa - I get a malware warning when trying to visit this site with Safari 6. It seems um.equads.com (presumably linked to from ft.com) is infected!
not really no, its all just like, someone's opinions, man.
Ya, the only thing I'm asking is that staid old tired microsoft use their enterprise customers as Guinea pigs for their SecureBoot and UI/UX experimentation, and leave us consumers with access to a clean marketplace for devices (read: no infecting motherboards with monopoly-extending signing keys and other DRM schemes).

That is all We The People ask.
Gods Will Be Watching (survival game, in HTML5)
But there aren't any massive "wrong things".

Missing start button and not booting to the desktop are by far the two biggest complaints I hear about Windows 8. These are, in the scheme of things, not exactly massive issues. There are numerous programs out there that fix this issue, and Microsoft can fix them with a minor tweak.

Metro apps have a load of problems, but since they are completely avoidable (and I think most people are just completely avoiding them) it's not a major issue. It's like widgets in Vista.

That workspace all the way to the left on OS X with widgets, whatever it's called. I've literally never seen anyone use that feature, but I wouldn't consider it a major problem that it's there.
Nginx security advisory (CVE-2013-2028)
Yeah it is better to walk than to sit. I hope our office has that rule. :)
To add to the other replies: from what I read at http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/02/prenda-laws-attorneys-take... :

"In effect, the responsible lawyers for a law firm conducting litigation before a court have refused to explain that litigation to the court on the grounds that doing so could expose them to criminal prosecution."

I'm not a lawyer, but what I took from that was that in this instance the Prenda Law guys were not being asked questions with relation to their role in the actual scheme. They were actually being asked questions in relation to their role as 'officers of the court' ie. as the lawyers for themselves that were involved in the scheme.

Oh what a tangled web they weaved...
3D printed gun shoots real bullets
The difference here is that it's not just US government entities being attacked -- it's US companies, particularly those already doing business in China. The counter-argument is a "you reap what you sow" vis-a-vis low cost offshoring, but in a lot of cases the risk is justified by the immense opportunities of participating in a 1B consumer domestic market.

Coincidentally or not, I received an email from one of my colleagues in Hong Kong this morning asking some IT security questions (as part of a customer IP audit of our greater China operations) regarding collaboration tools we use and whether they could be restricted to on-premise access and whether we could prevent content from being shared externally. Companies are taking notice, but I'd wager that almost none have deep enough pockets or internal expertise sufficient to erect reasonable security measures.
When my company was getting aquired we sent them the license details of some 50 projects as part of the DD, the lawyers emailed back and said to only include licenses to things we that were either not open source or that were substantial to the tech stack. SciPy, NumPy, Python, and GNU/Linux was all that was sent.
You misunderstand me. I don't think Microsoft does everything right. They seem to rush, and they seem to be loathe to admit that their products are anything less than amazing. Generally, their strategy seems to be "leap in with both feet then work out what to do." They're not Apple - Apple is probably crafting their next-gen interface right now and may well release it in a consummately polished single stroke at exactly the opportune moment. Maybe. But I know momentum when I see it and Microsoft is building it. Like I said, I expect the Windows 8+ ecosystem to continually improve and become more and more of a pleasure "straight out of the box." I'm not saying it's great right now or that ultimately Microsoft's gamble will work out, but I am optimistic.
And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc.
No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.
Nancy.Templates
FWIW, I always considered "dialect" to imply slightly different grammatical structures, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions.

Then again, I am italian, to me most of the english speaking world appear to be just "accents".

Anyway, wikipedia appears to agree that pronounciation only does not make a "dialect".

"""
A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology, including prosody). Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation (including prosody, or just prosody itself), the term accent is appropriate, not dialect.
"""
@yashg FYI your blog prevents zooming on tablets and small devices; could not read.
I didn't say it would be technically impossible, I said it would be noticed. If you make it a theoretical problem, and it most certainly isn't (there are a lot more practicalities involved), you're adding at least another string compare to every query. That's enough of a latency shift for me to notice in my graphs -- I notice when the Internet reroutes itself and my DNS latency goes up by 5 milliseconds.

This isn't a "could it be done?" exercise, it's more of a "could it be done without detection?" exercise. For this specific case, it's a pretty big risk.
Are you suggesting that injustices only matter depending on their statistical likelihood to happen to me (or you) personally? For example, I shouldn't care about a serial killer murdering strippers because I'm not, nor ever intend to be a stripper?
Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27
Tom Siebel's Big Energy Startup
Agreed. I'm sure people would trust/have faith in Google to do 'purchase and checkout' right. No idea why they can't seem to get it right. Even if it was just for their Play Store...
Not really a u-turn. More like re-fining.

It's like the Windows Vista to 7. Little tweaks here and there.

Win 8 has many changes. Some to the UI, some under the hood. Pretty impressed at the boot speed of Win 8 on a PC with an SSD.

Took a few days to get used to the UI changes, utilising shortcut keys the same way I do on every other windows installs means I see very little of the metro/start screen unless I want to.

My most used apps are all pinned to the start bar (eg: Chrome, Notepad++, etc).

I think most average users probably have 4-5 most used apps, those apps should be pinned to the task bar. Doing that, it kinda acts a bit like the OS X dock and so they just need to click straight on those without searching through menus etc.
Maybe neither of us are privy to Microsoft's innermost strategic decision-making processes, so neither are qualified to comment on whether they've thought this through?

That said, I would argue it is more efficient to expect that one of the world's largest companies would think very carefully about its options before making such a huge leap.

One more thing: remember that Microsoft is not gambling on the current Windows 8 UI paradigm itself. Not exactly. Microsoft is gambling on the general style: clean, clear typography matched with bold blocked colour and clear, simple iconography.

Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx.

Granted it's not perfect, there are still hiccups - the search magnifying glass for instance. I expect those hiccups to be ironed out soon enough though. Regardless, what Microsoft is effectively doing is staking its claim on a visual style, which it clearly thinks will be prime real estate over the next decade. I think it'll pay off handsomely. At the very least they've wiped the slate clean and laid a foundation that will be much easier to tweak in future.