skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can tell what Elop is saying is nonsense just from the article title. Specifically the word "choose".

Choose? Why did Elop have to "choose" Windows? Did Samsung have to choose between Android or Windows? Did HTC have to choose between Android or Windows?

They did not. Samsung sells both Windows and Android smartphones. The Android phones have sold spectacularly, the Windows phones have not. HTC sells both Android and Windows phones. HTC's Windows phones do not sell. HTC's Android phones sell well enough to keep them in the game - their profits are not spectacular, but they're doing better than RIM and other companies. I'm happy with my HTC One.

I go into a Sprint or AT&T or T-mobile or Verizon mobile store, and up front I see the featured phones - an iPhone, a Samsung S4, and an HTC one. Way in the back is a Blackberry kiosk. Next to it is a Windows kiosk with the HTC Windows phone, the Samsung Windows phone, and - depending on the carrier - the Nokia Windows phone. This is what Nokia is crowing about?

Maybe this type of talk might fool non-technical stock buyers who do not know any better. All of us know that Nokia could have made both Android and Windows phones, just as Samsung and HTC (and other companies) do. So we realize that his invention of the idea that they were forced to choose one or the other is nonsense. It's too late for Nokia to come in and be a big player in the Android market now, but it was not when way back when he sent his "burning platform" memo out.

Of course, some with perhaps more knowledge than me might say that Nokia was in bad financial shape and needed Microsoft to bail them out financially or they'd go under, and they were forced to go Windows only in that sense. That may also be true, but again, it has no relation to the bogus reasons he says he had to make a "choice" in the article. He seems to be in the only company that had to make a choice.
Immediate response - he admitted it was a mistake. Long term - I didn't stay to find out. I doubt anything changed, since this is so deeply engraved in company culture.
This is excellent, agreed on all points
Atoms for Peace quit Spotify: ‘It’s bad for new music’
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Those are stories that pass muster. The reason why you shouldn't rely on score-based is that someone will game the system and it will become worthless. PG helps choose the main feed/main page.
They did have significant distinguishing features previously, specifically their Nokia-specific apps like Nokia Drive and Nokia Transit. Drive for one, I speculate, drove a lot of adoption for Nokia within the WP market. It has received several favorable mentions even on HN, and personally I find it better than either Google's or Bing's navigation apps.

However, that strategy seems to have changed, with Drive being licensed to all Windows Phone devices, regardless of manufacturer. So they do lose a major differentiating feature, but they gain something else: the ability to make money on any WP device sold. I guess they prefer to differentiate on hardware going forward.
Damn, just when I leave Harvard, Schneier comes to town. Would have loved to do some work with him on security theater.
>maybe the key is not an increase in fees, but in a stricter admission.

Or, better alternatives. How do you make skilled trades more attractive?
If you're genuinely curious, I found it on the Haskell subreddit today!
And thanks to the web and social media, the world has gotten much smaller. If a company gets a reputation for treating hires like that, especially in the tech field, they will only get applicants desperate enough that they are willing to be treated like that.
Thanks, I'll check them out and play around with jamendo. Here's a nice site for distinguishing subgenres of music: http://www.furia.com/misc/genremaps/engenremap.html
Abandoning Maemo/Meego made me sad. I'm not going to second guess the decision. But when that decision was made they lost me as a customer forever. My last Nokia was the N900. I loved that phone.
> argue against the specific reasoning

What's with the /usr that should be mounted at start? What was wrong with /? And why should initd depend on the kernel?
They'll stay experiments if barriers are intentionally put up to prevent package compatibility.

Debian/kFreeBSD is an awesome idea, especially since FreeBSD's package system sucks and ZFS is unparalleled.

However, I don't think that's the only reason to avoid Systemd.
> Maemo/Meego wasn't really an option.

Now, why wasn't it? It was a solid OS, and there were two great products running it (N900 and N9).
He wrote an OS, in conjunction with students, called THE. It had a total of something like four errors in its lifetime.

He also spearheaded a compiler project which was made up of two teams where one part would check each other.

You should check out some of his work, in particular, his calling out computer manufacturers for making bogus hardware.
High paying jobs available in those trades.
I agree that the author is taking the suck-it-up-and-fire-when-you-must advice a bit far there. Also, per the preceding point on that slide,

Your first 5 employees are like 5 bullets in your gun. Each hire needs to make an impact.

if employees are like bullets, firing them would be key to having them make an impact.

[Yes, I know what the author meant, but the gun/bullets analogy is distracting while providing firing advice. I did still like the overall presentation.]
Devise 3.0 with Rails 4 support released
Don't forget early 386 steppings too. Remember the double sigma?
...and for those on HN who are self-taught and aren't aware of the history of computer science, ALGOL is the foundation of imperative programming and inspires just about every imperative language today.

Crucially, this means C and C++, which means that Dijkstra's work is part of the foundation for most operating systems and low-level code in the world - indeed most software systems period, since the vast majority of these are somehow based on C.
Debian isn't going to drop the ports! The blog post seems a sane roadmap for eventually switching to systemd on Linux and maintain a more traditional init process on the BSD ports. The fact that scripts and systemd can work in tandem on Linux makes this possible. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

The only downer is that now there'd be 2 init setups/configs to maintain. But that would be the case even if systemd were not the default, just available as a choice.
> In Haskell, this type of integer can't get bigger than 2^31...

It's platform-dependent

h> finiteBitSize (0 :: Int)
64

> We could have used the type Integer instead- This type of integer grows "magically" and can hold any sized integer, no matter how big... but it's slower, so we used Int instead, since our numbers will never get that big.

Premature optimisation at its best.
And here I thought the wackiest theory about Pixar films was the suggestion that Cars is actually the sequel to Terminator taking place 1,000 years after Skynet won.
Why A Unicorn Dies Every Time You Test A Private Method
SF plane crash: Responders turned chaos into hope
If so. that would be incredibly annoying. To many syllables to simply for triggering the listen event. How about they ditch the product branding requirement and just go with "OK phone", or even 'OK Google"? Ideally it would be even shorter, but understand why they need something a bit unique. Even so, Star Trek and 2001 had it right.
They take away your phone, when you enter North Korea. There are no reports of seized data, but you never what they are doing with your phone.
early in the film there is a shot that pans across a book shelf the titles of which are early experimental films done in CGI at least one of which was used as a cover for BYTE.

I cant recall the name unfortunately
Technical feasibility is not something the NSA can wish away. They're not magic. The fact is that keeping a microphone array active all the time would crush battery life, especially if it was constantly recording and transmitting.

Right now, even the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your phone. Doubt this will change anything in the short run.
We've funded several startups doing components of that. It's hard to do in the general case.

Essentially, every startup is a user-acquisition startup in its own domain, and it's hard to beat the good ones at their specialty.
You mean before black people could regularly excersise their vote?
Or the Magna Carta of 11something
They went after Pokedex apps a while back, around when B&W came out.
And let's not forget his work on concurrent processes: he invented the concept of the semaphore, which is still widely used almost fifty years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_%28programming%29
> . And in torture friendly areas, it's better to have the option to give up your password and be killed quickly than to have the adversary believe that there's a hidden volume they haven't beat out of you yet.

How will giving up the password ensure there isn't 'another' hidden volume?
`brew install haskell-platform` should help.
Never ever have I felt a stronger urge to downvote. Its one thing to be ignorant and vapid, entirely another to cast judgements from a position of entitlement, without even the bare minimum of an effort to edify yourself.

The shortest path algorithm comes nowhere close to his other accomplishment. A significant part of computer science stands on its feet, because of the foundations he built.
Almost anything can help "bootstrap a network effect"; if you have a real network effect offering, every user you gain, no matter how laboriously and no matter how marginally, helps the snowball get bigger.

The point the piece is making is the difference between the actual value of launch publicity (marginal) measured against the typical founder conception of the value of that publicity (enormous).

I've "launched" a bunch of stuff in my career and that part of Graham's piece rang especially true to me.
http://blog.reddit.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-m... - look at the "most addicted city".
Adjuncts are often making a living for themselves, or even doing interesting work in a field related to the course subject.
Do engineers want to 'try before they buy'(contract at a place before FT job)
In statistics there is a "golden rule", that when np > 5 and n(1-p) > 5, then the normal distribution is a good approximation for the binomial distribution. Here n is the number of experiments and p is the conversion rate.

Our A/B testing data results from a Bernoulli experiment, and thus is binomially distributed. So indeed, if we use tests that assume a normal distribution, if we want to approximate the binomial distribution when p is 0.0001, n needs to be roughly 50k.
I love it! I just wish I understood it.
Wouldn't it though, at least to a degree. If the solar system were moving through absolutely empty space there would be no external gravitational forces causing the exterior 'drag' resulting in a tail.
Who's to say the NSA wouldn't just add their own hotwords to the "extremely low-power hotword detection"?
I could not care less about systemd because sysvinit is working fine here. I hate that you are forced in most distros to choose systemd without any alternative. I want my own initscripts, if a distro doesn't allow me that I won't use that distro.
This looks like more of a speculative political comment than a technical one. Your last paragraph is the only one that makes direct observations on crypto implementation, but gets crypto so wrong that I'm not encouraged to answer it; as a starting point, the problems in Intel microarchitecture that have led to actual attacks on cryptosystems have all targeted pure software crypto so far.
Show HN: stealengine
Thanks for the info! I'm willing to get my hands dirty and see how it's all implemented there.

Just for the record, in Go, if you leave a goroutine blocked on a channel, the channel and the goroutine will remain on the heap unless you read everything from the channel (normal way) or close it (and get a runtime panic).
One of the reasons I wrote "there may be a handful that just grew by themselves" is that every time I learn the story behind one of these apparent instant successes, it turns out it wasn't so instant. I don't know the stories of all these companies, but I do know that Instagram's launch was preceded by a lot of manual recruitment of influential users.
To continue reading this story, you will need
to be a digital subscriber to SFChronicle.com.
Right, but good plumbers don't usually get the respect of a bad philosopher. And as far as that goes, education in the trades often fails to prepare the plumbers adequately for say, running their own plumbing business.
Like Star Trek, the Original Series? You'll like this.
> They should be just mentoring the next generation of research professors and doing their research, since that is where most of their money comes from anyway.

That’s exactly what universities are intended to do: Educate the future researchers and front-edge users of a particular field. For the more practically oriented, there are universities of applied sciences (the difference in naming is much more obvious in German: Universität ./. Fachhochschule) and even the dual education system with its trade schools.

The idea that every lowly programmer who wants to learn ‘just enough maths’ should go to university is – IMHO – frankly bullshit.
Good point. I did not consider people relocating for the job. In that case, I would want to try the person out before actually hiring her. If that's not possible, then obviously I wouldn't recommend ruining someone's life logistically for the sake of getting a better hire.

My main point was that after a week you'll probably either get along with an employee or not get along with them. In my experience, if you don't get along with someone, it usually does not get better over time.
Sticking to Gentoo for my personal systems (for many reasons, not just this issue). Slackware was my OS of choice once upon a time (there weren't many choices back then, though.)
Very reassuring, after recent news about spying and whatnot, and uploading of credentials to motorolla servers
Out of curiosity: have you tried "Reset Firefox" (in about:config – you won't lose anything if you don't have add-ons)? Most users experience a huge speedup when they use it.
But how would they differentiate from Samsung? Replacing stock Android UI with a custom skin, a practice that everybody seems to hate? Installing specific apps, which too, are often derided? The one Nokia app that is significant is Drive, but they could not leverage that because Google does not allow their own location-based apps to be replaced on their "open" platform. (See Skyhook lawsuit.) Their investment in Navteq would be a complete write-off.

That leaves the hardware arena, where, by my reading between the lines, Nokia felt it would not be able to compete effectively enough given Samsung's "vertical integration", not to mention, their "resources" (read: marketing budget).
Sure, but that's a little different than listening to everything. Not to mention trivial to detect. Just watch CPU consumption and start spouting off trigger words.
Besides, I think the Skype backdoor started before it was acquired by MS:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/12/skype_sur...
How do you measure that difference or, rather, how do you challenge the founder, who is arguably the best person to measure that? I've seen several founders attribute success to some critical piece of launch PR (often a big publication article).

Here's an esoteric example (I have a few more of these) - Qik's founders believe many years later Scoble's coverage of them was the reason for their launch being successful. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/03/qik-started-in-a-garage-dis...

Or the Warby Parker guys attributing their launch success to Vogue covering them (something I know they deeply believe to be true)
http://mashable.com/2013/03/07/toasting-success-warby-parker...
Access modifiers provide limited access control that should not be depended on. They are there to indicate what is in no way contractually agreed to retain the same implementation between versions of that code. So, test what you want, but testing private methods is a lot more brittle that writing a test for a public method and is just going to piss someone off.

btw- Unicorns are pretty popular in Ruby (http://unicorn.bogomips.org/). People must not be writing a lot of tests for private methods, because there aren't many dying. :)
mtorromeo's analogy is flawed.

With sshd, the user has to enable it (change startup settings or launch it manually) to become "less secure". By contrast, with rng-tools, she must change settings to become _more secure_.

Ever heard of the term "sane defaults"? To me, sane defaults are ones that by default, out of the box, keep the user secure. Decreasing the user's security, maybe to achieve increased functionality or ease of use, should require action on the part of the user. Why? Because history tells us that most users are lazy and will take little or no action. That includes action necessary to be secure.
Open season on black boys after a verdict like this
Technically, your are correct.

HOWEVER,
In most of the compiled versions you set speed/space/safety/debug levels 1-3 and get different uses of the type hints.

In SBCL, if i set safety/debug at high priority, I will get warnings or errors if I make a type mistake.

Furthermore, there is an option you can turn on to make the type infrencer tell you what it is doing.

Here's some example doc:

http://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/doc/cmu-user/compiler-h...

You'll notice that CMUCL's compiler is called 'Python' so technically, Python supports type inference. :)
So a XOR :-)
Yeah, Google (http://www.google.com/?hl=fa) Facebook. Basically any international website. If you ask UI developers of those companies they will tell you pains of making a UI that works both RTL and LTR
>he invented the concept of the semaphore,

I think he may have borrowed that from the railroads, even if he didn't invent it independently though, he was smart enough to see its usefulness and apply it.
I have a Galaxy note phone and if you press the home button twice it activates the Samsung Voice Talk. Sometimes I activate it by mistake and I lock the phone. 2 minutes later a warm fuzzy feeling from my pocket lets me understand that I did this again...
They need either less CPU intensive voice recognition or faster cooler CPUs if they want to go undetected with current technology...
This is a good point, but only if your attacker has access to cpu_state somehow. To do this, they would need to do one of the following:

1) Run code directly on the secure machine. Personally, I normally assume that if an attacker can run code, it's already Game Over. This includes running Java bytecodes and supplying data to media codecs, all of which can potentially be escalated to running code, and then further escalated to root.

2) Gain external access to cpu_state without running code, perhaps via a back-doored network card that colludes with the CPU. This would be pretty impressive, but it would also require some degree of network access. You can protect against this by sticking your whole computer behind a serial line and writing an extremely simple custom protocol in Go. This would make perfect sense for a credit card vault, for example.

3) Run a really exotic attack, such as the ones described in Reflections on Trusting Trust. For example, if the chip is willing to pattern-match on certain instruction sequences in the Linux kernel and replace them with compromised microcode, then we're in trouble. But if Intel ever got caught doing something this blatant, it would be a first-rate PR nightmare.

The nasty thing about a bugged hardware RNG is that it could silently compromise most of your encryption even if you had amazing perimeter security. And even if the attack were revealed, your chip vendor could claim it was just a dumb mistake.
https://twopointfouristan.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/pwning-pa...

This post linked from TFA is pretty good justification for SecureBoot, even if the protection provided by SB as it's implemented now can be bit questionable.
Huawei Windows 8 prepaid phone
Implying that being at the top of the class is some aspiration that should be sought after for everybody, debasing life into some competition.
When the kernel ABI has to change
Agreed - I don't think any of these should be used in isolation. But Kevin Systrom would tell you that recruiting photographers and influencers helped with launch because when that TC piece hit, everyone saw influencers/early adopters were already on the app, leading to a feedback loop with more 'influencers'.
> Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first programmer?

Definitely. You'll generally have to convince a programmer of your competence. Once you've passed that test, you may also have to negotiate with a non-programmer for your salary. At that second stage is when you want to be able to convince someone of your ability to multiply dollars.
What data source are you using?
PG, can you give a couple examples of enterprise startups that took the "consulting" approach to establishing successful (largely productized) businesses?
yes, if nokia had only kept up with bugfixes i might still be using my n900. the underlying OS worked wonderfully.
How many people have you fired after a week?

Have you ever been fired after a week?
Good question. I've been struggling with that a bit lately as well. I mean, I enjoy what I' doing and I think we're building some cool stuff, but when I look around and think about problems like "lack of clean water" and "prevalent infectious disease", and "hunger / lack of food" and "homelessness", etc. in various parts of the world, I sometimes feel a pang of doubt and sort of a "shouldn't I be doing something more important?" moment.

So how do I stay sane? Well... a couple of ways. For one, as a very pro-capitalist Libertarian type, I have a strong belief in entrepreneurship and small business as a way of improving the standard of living for people. And I believe that democratizing access to powerful software tools (via creating Open Source products) ultimately has second-order (or 3rd-order, whatever) effects of promoting business and economic growth. I look to the day when a small coffee farm in Africa or South America may use our products (for free, even) to help build their business.

But looking beyond even that, something dawned on me recently. When Douglas Engelbart passed away recently, all of the stories about his death prompted me to go back and read more of his writings (and some of his peers) and I sort of re-discovered something I used to think about a lot, but had forgotten: The idea of "intelligence augmentation"[1] and the implication that computers should serve to make us effectively smarter, both individually and collectively, and should enable us to come up with better (and faster) answers to hard problems... things like "lack of fresh water" and "lack of food", etc.

When I first started my professional programming career, I thought about things in those terms a lot (even if I didn't know the exact phrase "Intelligence Augmentation"), but I have drifted away from that mindset over the years. But now I think that was a mistake, and I'm trying to rediscover how to focus on building technology that has the effect of "making us smarter so we can solve hard problems".

So, in the case of Fogbeam Labs specifically, we were already going down the path of developing / researching / building / promoting stuff around the Semantic Web vision, we were just coming at it from a fairly simplistic "how can we make money by helping customers with this stuff?" mindset. Now I'm pushing to adopt more of a "will promoting this kind of technology make the world better for everybody, and, if not, what will?" mindset.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_augmentation
do you have a problem with competition?