skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the point where the author praises Windows Phone 8. Many people seem to have the (in my opinion) wrong impression that Windows Phone has not evolved from that crappy thing it was a year and a half ago.

The app gap is definitely a thing of the past. Really good Facebook and Twitter clients, Foursquare, Spotify, the Office suite, lots of cool third party apps (Instance, 6Sec...) for things that are definitely coming (Instagram, Vine, Flipboard). Games? Still not there, but MS has muscle to "persuade" devs.

The only problem I can see is innovation. It's happening on iOS almost exclusively. But I think iOS is another beast, Winokia (reserving rights for the name) is going for you, Android.
Will the amount of money they make pay for the power they consume?
> on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask

That's assuming they just don't have complete access to everything anyway, as Guardian seemed to indicate today is the case with SkyDrive. Even if NSA or the FBI[1] is not interested in you specifically, they still might mine your data.

1. These leaks and especially today's Microsoft leak indicate substantial cooperation and intelligence sharing between NSA and the FBI.
Sure but then your hard drive fails (as they tend to do) and you lose all the data. Sounds like the right solution is just encryption on the client + 3rd party cloud storage.
On windows 7+ putty does this by default.
When you can't have bugs, you can have proofs. While unknown angles of attack can exists, it is still possible to prove that the known ones are closed.

This is going to be costly…
Hey there! This is Mark, one of the * on Ales Organizers. I just want everyone to know that we've decide to take a shot at throwing an event focused on OpenStack at the same wonderful venue we have Ruby on Ales every year.

The CFP is open and we would love it if you would consider submitting a Proposal if you have anything related to OpenStack you'd like to share.
Actually you can stop it, by doing exactly what he says - you can eat free food at this particular place, but so can everybody else. It stops hunger, but it has a resale value of 0.
I appreciate your appreciation, and note also that we're well compensated in other ways for doing that work. The challenges will be around for several more months.

I'm just rebutting the idea --- which maybe you didn't mean --- that elitist infosec people were trying to set themselves up as gatekeepers. The opposite is true. Sean and I are working hard on getting as much of what we know about breaking cryptosystems into the challenges (set 7 is coming out probably next week, and I'm working on ECC stuff for set 8 now). We want the info out.

But look at the numbers I just posted: 8100 people have started the challenges. Just 51 people have managed to finish. I like the challenges a lot, but candidly: on the scale of professional cryptographic research, it's pretty basic; being among the 0.5% of challenge finishers wouldn't qualify you to design cryptosystems.
I think this is a feature of the ActiveClient middleware. Also handles the PIN entry when you insert. Default windows behavior is to leave the certs in the cert store.
MVP vs MVE (Minimal Viable Experience)
The public Instagram API is read-only and it looks like the Windows Phone apps that support uploading do so through something called Instagraph, which seems to be an unsupported method of getting photos onto Instagram.
But, the Nokia has a 1/1.2" sensor. That's huge -- almost 5.5x times the surface area of the iPhone 5's sensor. It's almost as large as the sensor in a Nikon 1 or Sony RX100 series camera.

Yes, the pixels are small at ~1.44 microns (I think most experts consider 6 microns to be the "ideal" size) so I would think the pixel density is actually lower than most cameraphones (the iPhone 5 is around ~1.39 microns).
I too came to comment about how I knew it was XMission before I clicked and wanted to mention the great things Pete Ashdown has been up to. But, I see others have already covered that.

While we're on the topic. Pete, please expand Utopia Fiber to Lehi! You promised :) [0]

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/shuzq/iama_isp_owner_w...
This is going to become less and less of a problem as time goes on.

There was a time when the idea of streaming high quality video and doing so using Flash, at that, seemed ridiculous, but it's ridiculously commonplace, now.

I often stream things from a VPS instance to my home via sshfs right now. Doing so over even 3G would work in many cases.
To play devil's advocate here, what else would people have Microsoft do? Is there a scenario in which they can successfully resist enabling surveillance features in their products while operating in the US?

Do you think the government would jail someone of Steve Ballmer's stature if he talked openly about what the government has asked of Microsoft. Because of his position he is much more protected from criminal action than almost anyone else. The reason he doesn't reject government requests is more likely that it would be bad for business not that he would suffer legal consequences.

... I think the proper place to direct your anger is at the laws that require them to cooperate.

I see the law as allowing them to cooperate. It gives them cover for not protecting the privacy of individual citizens.
Surreal and beautiful indeed. Refreshing even!
It has a higher overhead now, but how many people would actually use it, versus BI?

Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food.
I'd like a minimal smartphone, which comes unlocked or has some other way of assuring I won't ever get into this situation again. I think this is fair, since I have had to live with the consequence. Locking down the OS version of a phone is very much enough for me to never do business with that kind of company again. I would never buy a computer with an OS I couldn't upgrade, and Android phones are computers.

Further, I'd like a phone whose processing power is devoted to Android apps I choose, rather than carrier's undeleteable bloatware. I was hoping for something like a Nexus 5 this year, since the Nexus 4 seemed to have these traits.

I worry that the Moto X would replace a Nexus 5 in their roadmap, and that their desire to compete with the S4 will lead them to mimic it instead of having the kind of product I'd like.

So I see Google focusing so much effort on a Moto phone as a problem for me and what I want, not something to look forward to. Google once had the product I should have bought (Nexus 4), especially at that much lower price point.

I don't believe that Moto is any different now, because I haven't seen them implement better policies. From my POV, the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate they changed, since they decided to screw over me, and everyone else with a Photon. I don't need to give them any more money, unless they are obviously the very best phone available for me, and my wants aren't what people or the carriers apparently want.
You're absolutely right about where the risk lies. That's why large shareholders have become increasingly concerned about alignment. CEO pay is increasingly in equity and they are subject to minimum equity holding requirements and clawbacks. I'd like to see larger minimums relative to their equity compensation but in the grand scheme of things this is a small issue.

It's also worth noting that short-term investors are a greater threat to long-term focused decisions than pay incentives. Most CEO's aren't actually foolish enough to risk destroying their company for more money in the near-term. They like their jobs so what does terrify them is an investor demanding more leverage or adopting a riskier strategy on pain of advocating removal or a hostile takeover. When Chuck Prince said he couldn't sit down until the music stopped, he wasn't worried about a smaller bonus but about posting lower profits that would have led to calls for his removal. "There was a merchant in Baghdad..."
The chip technology is an older process using 110nm technology. There are already several companies working on 40nm technology which will be more power efficient and be significantly faster per chip.
German artist projects picture of KimDotCom onto U.S. embassy in Berlin
Seeking Spark, Microsoft Revamps Its Structure
I'll tell you why this time is different. Each time we had growth in technology that had the potential to displace a huge number of workers that technology also enabled a massive decrease in the costs of transactions (railroads, motor vehicles, the internet, etc). This allowed a massive growth in the economy which enabled these displaced workers to find new jobs. Also consider that the growth in technology didn't eliminate jobs, but it shifted them. The technology of old still required a mostly proportional human energy input to produce output. New technology decreased that proportion, but it didn't eliminate it.

This last point is the difference that this new wave of automation has compared to the waves of past. It is unprecedented in human history to be facing a future where human effort can be multiplied by such enormous multiples that the value of labor approaches zero. This coming automation revolution would have to simultaneously grow the economy to greater proportions that automation reduces the cost of labor. I don't believe this will ever be possible, but definitely not in the time period that a properly developed AI and robotic technology could corner the market in labor (once developed, less than a decade). Society is not prepared for what is coming, and it will be disastrous.
EVE: Very true. It's a game that's entirely possible to get involved in to a level that is a different kind of obsessed than, say, WOW.

EVE is all about people, interaction, politics, planning. WOW Raids, however complex thy get at higher levels, just can't ever compare. I've started, and stopped playing, many times, because of it.
What did Ballmer actually state there? I barely could find any message from that wall of nice words.

How the reorganization is going to differ from the earlier one?
We're working on a Javascript console, using the upcoming websocket stuff.
Whoops, my mistake. You get the option after you add them as a collaborator. I'll fix my comment above, too.
I would personally fear doing any product that tries to integrate all your media for all your devices...especially because Apple and Samsung are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D working on the exact same thing.
Google is spending half of Apple’s annual marketing budget promoting Moto-X
No, I don't think you're right. I think, even if the article is right, people don't give a damn. People are not that clever to react to a thing like this.
I didn't put that solution forward, another poster did. I don't really agree with him, because I think under the current circumstances, making all crappy jobs illegal is bad, as you say. I do believe some of the crappiest jobs should be illegal (that's why I agree with minimum wages as long as the amount is well thought), because that keeps the worst abusers in check. However, I think justifying it with "the market" and "Everyone needs that crappy job they hate in order to motivate them" is wrong. The only reason for that jobs to exist is that we can't provide better ones right now.
Sure, on a message board topic about it, but generally you don't expect to run across spoilers for a popular show in a science article a mere 2 years after the episode aired. "If you're not caught up on every popular show you may be interested in within 2 years, screw you" seems kind of harsh.

Anyway, no need to continue this sub-thread, just thought it was unnecessary.
> The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.

Most of the cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is in validating and enforcing the conditions on beneficiaries. Unconditional Basic Income avoids these costs quite directly.
I don't follow, do you care to elaborate? Are you suggesting that welfare programs are designed to be unpopular/to be stigmatizing?
Best Kickstarter project I've seen so far!
I'm surprised you're hitting that boundary at just 5-10K lines. I work on a team of 6* with about 60,000 logical Python statements (Not including tests) and aren't running into any language or framework induced roadblocks.

And this isn't even a case of "If you do everything perfect like me, [Language] works great!" - We only have 45% code coverage, and our code architecture, in certain places, is really sub-optimal (Caused by us, not the language).

When I'm about to make a major change to a function (different inputs or different outputs) I'll always start by grepping first to get an idea of what I'm about to get myself into, write or adjust tests for the new 'signature', change the function, and code/debug/test until it works. My team is in the loop before my code is committed to a shared branch.

* We have other responsibilities besides the Python code.

Edit:
If your team is stepping all over each other at such a low LOC, my hunch is that its related to a communication problem with the team, your code is too tightly coupled, or there's not enough architecture planning (Too much is bad, but so is too little).
Surely the 'trivia' in this instance is knowing the names of libraries, as opposed to be able to think through programming concepts?

Just like math homework back in the day, the teacher didn't do it to check your answer, they did it to check how you arrived at your answer.
You've actually been pretty vague about the concepts you're criticizing, except for "LINQ". Now I can see you were alluding to just the deferred execution part (the "lack of memoization").

Basically, you're saying it's too easy to accidentally perform a computation twice by iterating through a sequence twice. Recurse on that problem and you get an exponential blowup.

That is actually a problem mostly unique to LINQ and it is really important that a programmer understand the deferred semantics. Some tools, e.g. ReSharper, will detect multiple enumerations and warn you about it. Judicious use of ToArray/ToList solves most issues with defer-splosion.
On point 1, tax avoidance is more strongly incentivised if the costs are passed on to customers. Higher prices are a huge competitive disadvantage. A single company avoiding their taxes can undercut their competition and dominate the market, forcing all of their competition to follow suit.
Does kickstarter allow political campaigns as projects? :)
DC has enough people to create a market for retailers. It is not a question of if someone sells things, but whom. The idea that if these Wal-Marts don't move in, these people won't have jobs is a fallacy: They'll just have jobs working for a more responsible employer. As a resident of D.C., I'm happy with what the council has done here.
Exactly - wages do rise with inflation, but as we know from intro macro, there's always a bit of a delay due to contracts etc. The problem with inflation is it drives people even further up the risk curve to find yield.

The other problem is that while inflation incentivizes moving up the risk curve, capital gains work in the opposite direction, incentivizing idle cash balances. One side of the government wants you find yield, the other punishes you for finding that yield.

At the end of the day, you're just going to make people find that yield (they have to) and you won't increase tax revenue. People can stomach _some_ risk, but not an infinite amount (especially the institutional guys).
My software does not come in a box, nor have keys.
A quick look at Dropbox’s new Datastore API
I actually care more about having competition and choices than just openness. Open source softwares suffer from stagnation just like the closed ones when they are left with no competition. Which is why I am actively rooting for Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS. I am also hoping with more Mobile OSes, we will start seeing standards to interact and share data between them.
Human-Powered Helicopter Wins the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize
"I don't see why they can't pull in updates from the original repo."

Because github doesn't provide a way to do that on the site. Git workflows that can be achieved entirely on github.com were that subject of the story, and my original comment.
Too many deliveries had missed or swapped items, and although customer service was always excellent, it got a little tiring. Also, my perception (although I never actually checked) is that prices were slightly higher than driving down 2 blocks to Safeway and using my loyalty card there.

What might bring me back is a cost incentive on repeated purchases, say by offering 10% off if I sign up for regular monthly deliveries of common household items.
Hoe gezond of ongezond is ons dagelijks brood? | Leef Nu Gezonder
ASICs are going to rid a large amount of pools. GPU mining and FPGA mining will fade out, because the value returned will be so minimal compared to these monsters. There is a finite amount of bitcoins released for a set amount of time. The power consumed/bitcoin return ratio on GPUs/FPGAs as the difficulty rises due to the ASICs will just leave people frustrated.

GPU mining had one benefit. Once you gave up, you could at least resell the video card or play games. ASICs are basically trash. The FPGAs can be recycled on ebay.

For those uninitiated: Assume I am on an i7 2600k and you are on a Pentium 2 clocked at a fine 200mhz. If we are mining in the same pool (just us), I will probably do 99.99% of the processing, and receive that return. You probably spent more power than me with your outdated technology, and only received 0.000001% of the payout.
And the answer is because ssh is entirely keyboard driven. There is no good reason to clumsily mouse through a drop-down menu, then move your hand back to your keyboard, when you can type "zz<enter>" in an open terminal and you're ready to go!
I'm not convinced that "weak-willed managers claiming that everyone on their team is great" is an actual problem.

And what if they really are all doing great, on a given team? Then no sense in punishing someone just because you have to punish someone.

And if someone is underperforming? Their direct manager's job is to take care of it. If the manager isn't even doing their job of managing people, a grading curve isn't going to fix that.

Also, if it's only enforced at a higher level of hierarchy, then what happens is that it's the junior members of underperforming departments that get the shaft. They probably had the least to do with the team's underperformance, but they also have the least power and therefore the least ability to dodge blame. Shit rolls downhill.
The peculiar part for me with Google is that they seem to be somehow immune from all the revelations. People keep stand by it and get annoyed when reminded of their wrong-doings. I suspect at this point, they're not much different than Microsoft. But the "don't be evil" brand is still strong in the mind of many.
Building a Black Swan: Disrupting NetApp, EMC, Amazon’s S3, maybe all BigData
> the world needs more Pete Ashdowns and more Xmissions.

Yes sir, we do.

Also, fun fact for the tin foil hat crowd: Pete is Mormon.*

*EDIT: I've heard too much "Mormons run the NSA/CIA" BS lately. I'm not Mormon and I think their faith (like most) is absolutely whacky, but I can't say I've ever met one that I didn't like. I know, I know: crass generalization... but damn if it ain't true.
1) Right agreed with all points, and also:

How much quality programming exists in you per day? 2 - 5 hours?

The occasional 8 - 10 hour quality effort might also exist but it does not happen for me every day. I can try and force the issue but quality degrades.

And like my dad always told me, "Answers will usually come in your dreams."
It's not mobile; it's old versions of Mono having a completely shit GC. Do you know whether Unity has upgraded to SGEN yet?
"Some state governments" as in 38, with Connecticut and Texas apparently doing the heavy lifting for the states.
40 Days of Dating
Why is this being downvoted? I use an HTC 8X as my main phone but the points mentioned in this comment are perfectly true. For comparison I also own a Galaxy Nexus and 4th-gen iPod touch.

Searching in both the stock and Nokia Map apps doesn't seem to do any intelligent keyword parsing/correction as even the web version of Bing Maps does, push notifications tend to be unreliable compared to iOS and Android, live tiles simply don't consitute a notification center, and abandoning Windows Phone 7 meant that some phones barely got a year of updates.
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
Would be good for T-Mobile to back Jolla ;)
I wish that were true. I really, really do.

Unfortunately, too many people just don't give a damn.
Makes we wonder - if somehow we could train our bodies to transfer memories to other body parts... which leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities.
I read this thread his morning and I'm having a really difficult time figuring out how the discussion has changed since then. Which comments are new? Which comments are valuable?

Does anyone else have this problem on HN? Any solutions?
Herbert West, MD, is doubtless all over this one.
A good point. Not very sensible forgoing a good product out of spite. However, I find it acceptable to demand exceptional service and keeping consumer pressure on a company that made poor products until it releases a good one. If you screw up, you have to be way better than the competition, and your promises are dirt.

In that respect, OP's done all right by ensuring that Motorola's past failures are front and center so that they understand the value of doing these things.

That said, the Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE (I'm not making that up) does have an unlockable bootloader so they are making progress.
L.A. freeways as a subway map
You don't need that tr, just sort -f and then uniq -i.
Of course, whoever put -f as the ignore-case flag for sort should be shot methinks, or rather the one who first added -i as "ignore nonprinting characters".

Edit: and while we're on the subject, you can get rid of head and use awk 'NR<=10 {print $2}'

Edit²: I would also like to point out that your version is superior to any short C# program, because sort can sort sequences that exceed the amount of RAM you have.
It's definitely the way to go - I don't want to decide if I'm looking at a page mobile or desktop or anything in between.
Firefox OS Simulator 4.0 released
Hey Alex, sure thing, we can meet up in Paris for a coffee! Always good to talk shop with other people :-)

I hear you for your roadblock - I also find it hard to come up with a strategy that uses your skills, with things you love, and that meets a market.
I just last night finished the last piece I wanted to accomplish on my high altitude fully spherical imagery project.

https://plus.google.com/107235276879849058634/posts/XUWE6zSx...

As seen here a few months ago
http://robotrising.org/2013/01/operation-stratosphere-conclu...

I'm contemplating doing a computer vision-based telescope tracker next.
> Microsoft often "competes" by trying to strangle competitors revenue streams even when it's outside their core business, where they will happily lose billions on Bing and their online division if it can reduce Googles revenues:

This is true as you point out. However it's worth pointing out that Google is the exact same.

They release free products that Microsoft charges for loosing money to reduce Microsoft's primary revenue stream.