skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon India offers 1 free bestselling title Kindle ebook for the next fortnight
Google App Engine now supports Git Push-To-Deploy
Microsoft's business model is basically "we are all things to all men". It's all about vertical integration.

They aren't attractive because their products are necessarily that compelling on their own, it's that if your entire computing is Microsoft (as it was for many people late 90s-early 2000s) a lot of problems go away.

The killer app for Windows server is that it is designed for managing Windows desktops for example. If you are running OS X desktops, why bother with it?
I think you have to keep in mind Azure is not just a PaaS (which of course is still in beta as websites)

It's has an IaaS equivalent of EC2.
An good reason to use IPsec is that with IPv6, the specs recommend your home router to block all incoming connections - except IPsec (ESP & IKE).
I think you may have answered your own complaint there.

IIRC the PS3 was even more expensive when it came out.

One advantage of a console is that it is an "investment" in that you know buying one will give you at least 5 years worth of supported gaming. Compare that to buying an iPad, the first gen iPad was released in 2010 and it basically obsolete now.
> This is probably an incredibly incomplete list.

You've actually hit Microsoft's five business units. In order of revenue:

Business Division (ie, Office): $24B

Windows & Windows Live: $18.8B

Server & Tools: $18.7B

Entertainment & Devices: $9.5B

Online Services: $3B.

With the exception of Online Services, each of these business units alone is doing enough revenue to qualify for inclusion on the Fortune 500 list.

Entertainment & Devices makes more revenue than Yahoo does in total. More than Hertz and Barnes & Noble.

I would love -- love! -- to be spread so thin.
Be careful. Music engages your creative hemisphere. This doesn't matter much if what you're doing is a simple, repetitive task. But if you're trying to design or program, it might kill your ability to "think outside the box" and invent creative solutions.

In my case, listening to music while programming has a very pronounced effect: I will spend 30 minutes crafting a function that will do something. The function will eventually work. And then I will stop listening to music and several minutes later notice that the function was entirely unnecessary, because I can make an architectural or data structure change instead and avoid writing the function altogether. This is something I am unable to do while listening to music.

Once I noticed this, I started being careful: I'd listen to music while configuring routers, but not when planning and designing the changes. You get the idea.

So, before you start listening to music while working, I'd advise you to check if your brain works the same way (the effect might not be exactly the same for everyone).

These days I mostly use natural sounds (the Naturespace app for iOS is great) and good headphones to mute background noise.
Yo-Yo Ma - Bach, Cello Suites
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHzfD6XLK7Q
I guess the idea would be to stuff your pockets full before you blow the whistle.
Utah home to NSA’s new billion-dollar mega-warehouse for data secretly compiled
7 Ways To Repurpose Your Best Marketing Content And Boost Your Site Traffic
As a Python programmer, I agree.

Here's a Ruby snippet. I don't want to pick on this particular project [1], rather, I've found that this is typical of Ruby code:

state_machine :state, initial: :active do
after_transition any => :blocked do |user, transition|
# Remove user from all projects and
user.users_projects.find_each do |membership|
return false unless membership.destroy
end
end

My conclusion? Ruby's syntax is awful. There are colons, absolute value bars, implications, and who-knows-what-else flying everywhere! It gets worse, elsewhere in the same file there are messy lines like this one with single-arrow implications, question marks and ampersands [2] [3]:

scope :not_in_project, ->(project) \
{ project.users.present? ? \
where("id not in (:ids)", ids: project.users.map(&:id) ) : scoped }

Simple, intuitive syntax? From where I sit, the syntax of Ruby is worse than C++, and approaches Perl levels of awfulness. In most languages, I can at least sort-of grok what's going on from the context when I see unfamiliar operators, but not so in Ruby.

This is a copy-paste of a comment I made [4] weeks ago on another article.

[1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/4caaea824cf51670d1...

[2] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/4caaea824cf51670d1...

[3] I split the line and inserted backslashes because HN gives me a horizontal scrollbar when it's a single long line; apologies if this transformation isn't legal Ruby, or changes the meaning of the code.

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5784296
>First, I don't think you want to fight counterterrorism, but, rather, terrorism?

You could read "fight" in that sentence as intransitive and "counterterrorism" as the domain of that fight.
Our wedding photographer was great; she gave us an unlimited licence to the photos (she also retained her rights), and also gave us a DVD of the RAW files in addition to her mastered JPGs.

The whole thing didn't seem like a big deal to her. In fact her web-site lists what you'll get, and while we did ask about the RAWs it wasn't a big negotiation point (we did pay for the DVD at a small markup like you'd expect).

I don't think RAWs should be a "normal" part of the deal as 99% of people wouldn't know what to do with them. But I do consider a liberal licence to be par for the course (in particular as that photographer might go out of business, and you might need to print your photos again years or decades from the original event).

So to the OP: Find a different photographer. The licence thing is unacceptable. The RAW thing is understandable but I bet you can find someone who is more amenable to that.

PS - If you get the RAW files, don't try to print them 1:1. They exist to be mastered, not to be used as-is.
That is absolutely amazing. I am so in love with Carbon Based Lfieforms right now.

I'm terrible at music genres myself, but I am a huge fan of Bonobo's music. It's classified as trip-hop - no idea if that falls under this category.
Bonobo - Black Sands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTjF2_-bneM the entire album is amazing

He just released a new album not long ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62Z4ibZFA6c&list=PLXEYOK9pTAB...
It has Java support as it plays bluray discs.
While there is an air of convenience to being able to pull your games from thin air, it's not really that difficult to carry around your games. Perhaps being able to store them on an SD card would be a pretty good comprimise. I like the idea of not having a load of plastic - but it's no great hardship plugging in a cable, or carrying a TV from one room to another. I keep my gamecube (yes gamecube,) packed away, if I want to use it - I just pull it out. If I want to listen to music in another room, I carry a music player through to it. But these days we are sold overly technical solutions to problems, like wireless music systems (with klunky interfaces), and such, which don't really give you much back. I was still watching an old school CRT tv back in December before it died on me, and once I was ingrossed in what I was watching, I didn't care what I was watching it on. Same goes for SSD's on computers, sure they increase boot and load times - but who cares about 2mins vs 40seconds? It doesn't really matter.

I'm not following the sharing idea - can you share a title at no expense? Can you lend a title? That sounds great. Don't get me wrong, I'm up for a little added convenience - but as other's have said - downloading a few Gigs to play a game - is currently more difficult (and probably wasteful,) than just copying the game onto another medium and walking somewhere with it.
> But programs in languages which enable, if not encourage, developers to add new methods to the integer '5' can quickly become very difficult to reason about.

Can you give me an example of a single ruby developer who thinks this is a good idea when writing new code/a library?
In spotify, the "Exam Study Classical Music…" playlist is good to know: http://open.spotify.com/user/127564522/playlist/0CwzkFXVbEK6...
Introduction of Chinese Tomb-sweeping Day
Chinese tomb-sweeping day is a traditional festival in China, on which people usually visit their ancestors' graves and mourn for the dead. Read Chinese tomb-sweeping day and get more information about Chinese culture.
+1 for coffitivity, I never imagined that a noise like this will help me focus until I started using it a few months back
It may be obvious but to clarify only one of your family members can be playing from your shared library at a given time.
You don't know Haskell.

> take 8 $ cycle [1,2,3]
You reminded me of the old chestnut: One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter....
Doesn't work for me, i can't concentrate with this music..
I'm not sure if this will even work for a broader range or people because music is so much subjective..

For me it totally depends on the mood what music i can work best with, but usually it's some electronic house music where i can concentrate best.
"If you are running OS X desktops, why bother with it?"

Because you want to run applications that only run on Windows Server?
I remember reading somewhere that the policemen in the raid did not know what were going on, or even who the target was. I wouldn't be surprised if they thought they were taking down a terrorist cell, given that the personal used was the counter-terrorism special tactics Group.

Reading the Wikipedia article about the task force, their job is in dealing with high risk situations involving armed offenders and possible terrorism related events. They also train with New Zealand Special Air Service Commandos. In that context, the raid makes much more sense in how it was conducted, with silencers, helicopters, dogs and 20-30+ personal. The real question then comes to who in the command structure decided to use such group for serving a warrant, and collecting evidence for an assisting copyright infringement case. Given the nature of the crime, the low threat level (admitted in court), this is rather uniquely in history. One might also wonder how much influence the FBI had in the decision.
Fully agree, I'm a ocamler myself, was trying to make parent op think. Companies with dynamic language codebases should be fearful of the technical debt they've accrued (and hire us static guys to fix it!).
For people who don't tend to click video links (like me, but I happened to already see this), it is a sarcastic and clever dig at MS.

The introduction is the start of an "instructional video" for how to lend games to your friends, complete with "Step One" and dramatic PS4 music, and then the guy just hands a game to his friend who says, "Thanks."

I think it is a clever ad, and a good position to take. I'm not much of a gamer so I am not their core demographic, but I tend to buy something from each generation of consoles and "less-obnoxious DRM and no region-locking" would be a no-brainer for me in terms of choosing.
What makes it a bit more complex than it would be in Ruby is the typesafety (what comes after RichSeq). So it's a bit harder to write such a library, but once it's written it's a breeze to use for users because the compiler tells them right away if something is wrong with the type.
Somewhat true but I find Scala's inferred typing a surprisingly great compromise between the two.

For example:

val i = 1;

i = "some string" // throws a compiler error, because it knows i is an integer

It's great when you haven't declared the types, you change for example an int to a double or a class to some other class (eg swapping a data structure) and it just flows through the code base without problems like a dynamically typed language.

It can also be pretty useful to look up types when they get complex in the middle of some function, like a Map[List[(String,SomeObject)]] (a map of lists of (String,SomeObject) tuples). Allowing the types to get complex lets me focus on the problem while giving a crutch to quickly remember where it's at half way through (and while finding other methods/source of data) and keep moving towards the solution.
This is what's happening in China now. They've had the great firewall for 10 years - what's happening since then has been further development of ways to manage what people think. So they allow weibo, etc. to work, and are figuring out how to control the message.

By controlling a few birds at the right moment, you can control where the whole flock goes, and it still thinks it's free.
Everyone on reddit seems to be up in arms about used game sales, as in the ability to trade in a box + disk.

But really, this will likely be the last generation of consoles to support a physical disk.

I imagine that by the end of this "round" of consoles 60%+ of game sales for these consoles will be digital downloads.

What do use game sales look like in a digital marketplace?
If you allow gamers to freely transfer licenses then what is to stop me selling my game to someone in singapore at 1AM when I have finished playing and then coming back the next day and buying the same game back at a reduced rate from someone in australia who has just gone to bed and picking up where I left off?

The only sensible way to allow this would be via DRM which makes /r/gaming shit the bed.
I thought the mindless Microsoft/Xbox bashing was Reddit's job. The XBox One will sell and it will sell well - it has loads of blockbuster titles and is pretty powerful, and I personally love the idea of integrating my Sky box with my XBox.
That's just annoying though. It's like not being able to move your music freely around your devices. Granted that you probably will probably only have one Xbox one, but it's still a pain.

MS don't seem to have sorted the licensing model, to make it convenient with their OS, I have a copy of Windows 8, that I want to move from one machine to another at some point, and I'm sure it will be non-trivial. Not to mention that I'll loose Windows media centre most likely in the process. Even the install for Windows 8 for me was an incredibly convulted process at the time.

When DRM impinges upon usability, and convenience - it's just a complete pain in the backside.
I wasn't thinking of my own situation. Whether it is £300 or £429 doesn't make much difference to me - but there will a lot of households where it does.

[Even my teenage son, who thinks that money magically grows in the Bank of Mum & Dad thought that £429 was a lot - if he noticed then MS probably have a pricing problem].
It's a great idea from the point of view of the seller. If you have people who have money and frequently travel internationally, you can force them to buy two (or more!) copies of every one of your products they use.

You can also do price discrimination. Those rich guys in the US and Japan can afford $100, so you'll charge them that much. The up-and-comers in China might be able to do $50, so that's the price for them. Africa? Since $20 is like a month's wages for a whole village or something, that's probably all you can get out of them, and with those prices you're only making three fiddy after you cover the per-unit support costs for that always-online thingy. But you really need that so you can do geolocation, and can keep all the annoying entrepreneurs on HN from buying a million African copies when they're on safari, then eating your lunch by reselling them to the US and China for $30.

This is assuming customers want the product badly enough that they're willing to put up with this garbage. Which they generally do -- most people don't travel internationally and aren't affected; furthermore, software is not a commodity and there may not be completely interchangeable alternatives so their only choices are to put up with it or make do without.
Very cool. Somewhat nauseating, but cool :-)
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The quote in front is-
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Microsoft had all the cards to win the device war. But they forgot what made them win the PC war.

They tried to emulate apple while forgetting that people that bought into apple ideology already had apple.

If the W8 arm was unlocked it would have been a big winner. WP7 just needed fast moving instead of stagnation and they almost got everything right with the original xbox and X360 in the beginning.

But I am moving away from microsoft right now even as a desktop. Arch with KDE is almost as good. There is surprising gaming support and the only real show stopper is the terrible fonts in JetBrains products.
Agreed, seems like way too many fronts to fight on. Back in the day when they were the evil empire (TM), this probably made sense - they were able to steamroll into new markets, right over the competition. Now that they're playing catch up in many of those areas, probably not so much.

Also, there's more: They're quite a bit into hardware, making input devices and, lately, Surface. They're also a big name in the enterprise software world, offering their own CRM and, I'm sure, tons of other things. They really do everything.
But a large chunk of the really compelling Windows Server applications are about management of Windows desktop.
Show HN: Keep your inbox clear and make notifications useful again
It's gonna be a lot of fun when the master keys leak and someone writes a fake server that just authorises every game. Surely microsoft know that this is 100% going to happen?
Working in a .NET corporate dev shop, I'm shocked how many .NET devs now run MacOS at home as their primary OS. It starts out as a mac for some iPhone dev and then they just use MacOS by default and Windows in a VM when they need to.
Slightly offtopic but can you point me to a description of said font issues? My Android Studio (IDEA) fonts seem fine (on latest Kubuntu and Fedora w/ KDE).
I agree with you about carrying around discs being easy. I am based in New Zealand, and carrying around a disc is alot easier and cheaper than always downloading the game. I think downloading games is an incidental feature when the game licencing is centrally controlled with cloud-based distribution.

I think Microsoft's biggest failure is the marketing around the Xbox One and their failure to explain how the game sharing works. Just from my personal understanding of the link I posted, it seems to me that you can let up to ten people play any game that is owned by your account. So, once you buy a game, any of those ten people can play it without purchasing it themselves.
The average consumer will care much more about the platform exclusive games than any DRM systems. You can't sell used games on Steam either, and they receieve very little flak for it nowadays.
Ah, but PC game retail prices are much lower than on consoles, which is why most people tolerate the insanely restrictive Steam licensing conditions. Frankly, if they took licensing condition form anyone, i wish they'd stolen it form one of the app stores (which is closer to what they've done than steam), where you can have 10 simultaneous installs and users per purchase.
>And second, what's with this business of "legal and necessary"? It doesn't matter if it's "necessary", it doesn't matter if it's really really super useful, it doesn't matter if it's very efficient. The only thing that matters -- that should matter, in a democracy -- is whether it's legal and constitutional.

Well, no. The Constitution is not the be-all and end-all of governance, nor does it forbid all possible onerous behaviours. The position of the USG is that what the NSA engages in is constitutional. Even if that were the case, that wouldn't make it a good idea--unless it were necessary. You could implement a 1000% tax on beer and it would be perfectly legal and constitutional, but would also need to be somehow necessary in order for it to be justifiable.

Even if what the NSA is doing is deemed constitutional, that doesn't mean it's right or a good idea. In order for that to be the case, it'd also have to have a strong claim of necessity.
I go the other way -- I write in Python by default, then only go to another language if I specifically need it, for example these scenarios:

(a) Python isn't fast enough, and Pypy doesn't make it fast enough, or isn't a viable option in the target environment. So you write in C, OpenCL or assembly language.

(b) A vital library or other dependency can't talk to Python and you can't quickly find or write a reimplementation or bridge.

(c) Python isn't supported in the target environment, for example, the web browser [1] or the iPhone.

[1] Yes, yes, I know, things like Skulpt and Pyjamas exist. But I think those dependencies are too heavy for a lot of projects.
Smoking in the presence of other people can harm them
If you think the price is unreasonable (and I think it is), either go elsewhere or negotiate. Either way, you need to go out and get some other quotes. If you're going to negotiate, you really need some other quotes as examples (for leverage).

It was a non-issue when I got married. The photographer printed a 4x6 of each picture and put it in an album. We got the album and all the negatives. (Yes, the wedding and the wife were a long time ago.)
Current consumer SSDs even with developer / power user usage patterns should be able to run for at least 30 years before the flash is no longer guaranteed to work (1000 block wipes). The write amplification problem was mostly for the first naive SSD implementations that would do a block wipe cycle on every write. These naive SSDs have about 4 IOPS of 4K random write, you'll notice that.
Email app notifications are created with smart algorithms (especially the daily digests), which can be useful to read them.

But when using tonnes of apps/tools, they just clutters your inbox, and I end up ignoring them.
Nicaragua waterway to dwarf Panama canal
> If you are running OS X desktops, why bother with it?

If you are one of the small minority of people running OS X in a business environment then of course Microsoft's vertical integration is less useful. But well over 90% of business desktops/laptops are Windows based, so Microsoft has an attractive model for many businesses.
The audio from the helicopter features radio reports from the ground team with words to the effect "target secured" (ie. they knew they were after Kim specifically, once he was restrained that was their objective completed).
The speed with which one technological company can fall is amazing as history has shown time and time again. According to joel spolsky Excel 4 made lotus 1-2-3 obsolete virtually overnight and that was the beginning of the end for them.

The fact that MS is strong now means nothing in the long and even midterm.

The total share of world computing that Microsoft controls now is lower than in the 90s. They have trouble getting good products out except in Server and Azure divisions. They are bleeding developer loyalty and they are turning into Apple style control freaks without having the charm of Apple.
There wasn't much they could do to improve Maps without getting it in the hands of millions of people.
Lacking much imagination. DPRK don't need a server farm just a pen drive from St. Petersburg.
Sorry but I'm not willing to be tolerant of intolerance. The chance of actually turning around a wilfully ignorant racist on the internet is very low; broadcasting the message "these attitudes are not socially acceptable" is easier (I suppose you could consider that prevention rather than cure?)
If you don't want to depend on the arbitrary decisions of Microsoft anymore, the Linux ecosystem welcomes you and your developments :)

You won't find Visual Studio, but I think everybody agrees Linux is a fine dev environment. And if someone makes a controversial change, a fork almost always happens, which is simply impossible in the Microsoft world.
Apple had timer deadlines (much the same thing) in the kernel since the 10.5.5 release for their then new MacBook Airs, in November 2008.