skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good point! I have strong opinions on the matter [1] [2]. Yes, consumers are partially to blame. As evidenced in this comment thread, some consumers have reached a level of "this is good enough, I am satisfied." Presented with an alternative that does not exist today, at a price point they could afford, even those who consider today's technology to be "good enough" would be stirred to reconsider.

I should clarify the point I am making when I say that Microsoft and others should be investing in higher-quality displays. They should be working to drive down the manufacturing costs, allowing such devices to be sold to enthusiasts, then pro-sumers, and eventually to regular consumers. For Microsoft to benefit from new technology, the technology needs to be within reach of a sufficiently large market.

In [1] below I point out that when the 30" LCDs debuted in ~2007 (if my memory is correct), they sold for $1,100. I bought my first 30" LCD in 2008. For $1,100. That monitor malfunctioned in 2011. I looked to replace it and ultimately did. For $1,150.

Meanwhile, every other desktop monitor size saw falling prices. Was the steady price for 30" LCDs evidence of price fixing [3]? I'm not sure. But I doubt the cost to manufacture of a 30" monitor remained steady at, say, $600 for several years while every other monitor size became just a sliver above disposable. Finally, starting around 2012, the Korean manufacturers are shaking things up. Bravo to them!

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pretend-its-a-tablet

[2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/hd-sucks

[3] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57348830-38/lcd-makers-on-...
Yes, because Windows and IEB are a fraction of Microsoft.
I would agree that we were all a bit clueless when we took high school physics but this was the second year of physics, in a four year degree program either on physics or on electrical engineering. (which I believe were the only two degree tracks at the time that did the full four year core physics curriculum) The time for not understanding was past.
I'm a big fan of desktop computers, but I honestly don't care about larger monitors. When I hear about immersion, I think about something like Oculus Rift and Leap Motion, not a gigantic LED display, which I might not even have space for. 22' is good enough for me.

To me, desktop is mostly about:
1) Quality controls. Good keyboard and mouse are much, much more convenient than a bad keyboard and a touchpad or touchscreen, provide that the UI isn't designed by idiots. (IMO, the capabilities of mouse and keyboard UIs are still severely underutilized and slowly choked down by substandard UI libraries. There is so much more that can be done here.)
2. Dedicated workspace/gamespace. With a good chair, speakers, proper lighting, proper desk. That's the kind of things that contribute to "immersion" for me.
> Ten years ago Microsoft was just getting into the video game business, now they essentially own it

Sony and Nintendo might disagree. Nintendo kicked serious butt for most of the last generation. Sony has been doing well, at least matching MS, in the last part of the last generation. The next generation still hasn't started much, though Nintendo definitely messed up on its start. It remains to be seen if there is much of a console market left; the winners of this generation just may very well be Apple and to a lesser extent, Google.
I have had a similar thought. The multiple of 3 seems to be a nice heuristic to track and tame complexity in many fields. Nature of any problem undergoes fundamental changes when the problem size is tripled and our solutions should be reviewed accordingly.

Here is what I mean. Say your startup has only one employee. You come up with certain processes to make it productive. However, when the team size goes to 3, 9, 27, it would be a good idea to review those processes and rules. Those seem like appropriate milestones to me for future planning. Not too short, nor too long.

Another example: Let's say I want to understand a topic like, say, Relativity. I think an effective approach would be to first read a one paragraph summary which barely describes the big picture of it. Once I've done that, I look for an article 3-times as long (say, a page). Next would be an essay which is about 3 pages. 9 pages, 27 pages and so on.

By not taking a big jump, (say a multiple of 10 or more), I make sure that I have a good foundation based on experience to be able to understand the next stage of complexity. And a jump less than a multiple of 3 would tend to be not the most productive.
I accidentally voted your comment up.

I meant to vote it down.

Calculus is not basic math. And many students find it difficult. I remember Calculus 3, in particular, was hard for me. Now I look back at Green's Theorem, Lagrange multipliers, Vector fields and surface integrals and it all seems so basic. But that was NOT the case for the 17 year old me sitting in that big lecture hall.
The problem is that if you add all those compelling features to Surface RT, you end up with Surface Pro. Which brings you right back to the question of why Surface RT needs to exist.

(The answer: because Surface Pro is too expensive to appeal to the consumer tablet market, and because Microsoft wants to hedge its bets in case Intel can't catch up to ARM in the mobile space. But both of those are reasons why Microsoft would want Surface RT to exist, not why a customer would.)
You're not allowed to make money on adult content on Blogger. https://www.blogger.com/content.g This is a recent change, and feels a bit like a shot across the bow designed to force the biggest adult bloggers off the service.
I'd guess it's related to the renewed interest in privacy prompted by Snowden's recent disclosures of the NSA's activities. It's interesting to see that it's not just the NSA that wants to do warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. (See also the recent articles about all the local governments that are scanning license plates and archiving the data on where everyone has been.)
The difficulty here is that no one who is even mediocre would ever do a "contract to hire".

I would, but at a real consulting rate (over $150 per hour) and not at a salary rate, since it comes with none of the benefits of being salaried.

That kind of arrangement is going to lead to adverse selection in the end. At typical tech salaries, you'd be asking me to take a 50% pay cut for (not much) additional job security. The main upshot of being FT (aside from benefits but those don't merit a 50% pay cut) is that it takes ~30-60 days to fire someone without severance. For contractors, they don't have to do that PIP bullshit. But I prefer to plan my career based on upside, not job security/what happens if I'm fired.

The rate at which I'd take a contract-to-hire gig is one at which I wouldn't happily convert to full-time, unless there were a huge promotion in the mix. The people who would convert without a big promotion are the ones you don't want, because they plan on coasting.
I like your idea for making the set and creation commands more aware of time. I will think about this. Thanks a lot.
This isn't just Tumblr's search. They're cutting blogs off from search engine indexing too. And if you reblog anything from a blogged flagged as adult, it's looking like your blog gets flagged too.

A lot of the line between "adult" and "art" is very blurry, but anyone who deals with nudity is at risk here. Tumblr has a huge community of artists, who now have to worry of being censored.

"Sure, you can have a blog, but no one on the Internet will find it, ever." Sounds great.
I am not aware about now, but there was a while when Pakistan authorities denied US land crossing its territory in its way to supply Afghanistan. That divergence seemed pretty real.
So what are my options if I can't use a service that can potentially serve ads? None?
The 2014 Corvette Stingray Killed Steve Irwin
Another possibility is that older PCs are still good enough. My 4 year old Core 2 Duo MacBook with an SSD has felt speedy enough for all my day-to-day tasks (including driving a 24" display) that I just haven't bothered upgrading.

How well do Windows 7 and 8 perform on older hardware?
How to gain more than you invest in reading
Hitting China’s Wall
That's the issue. A job explicitly labeled "contract to hire" is never done right. No good developer is going to do contract to hire at 1/52 of the salary, because they already either make an equivalent salary or far more as a contractor. The company isn't going to pay an actual contracting rate, because they are either cheap or can't afford it. Contract to hire is almost exclusively done in places where it's hard for a developer to find a good job and it's used to take advantage of this situation.
Is it the perf room? Please tell me it's the perf room.

(Relevant anecdote: where I used to work had a makeshift UI rig with webcams and laptops. It could be dragged into any conference room for bringing in end-users (teenagers) to try out new games/experiences/interfaces in progress. How do yo find end users? Offer $5 to $20 gift cards on craigslist for their time if your product is broad enough.)
You think Australia isn't a surveillance state?
As I remember it, there was a feature implemented where leaders (veteran accounts with high vote averages) do get something of a boost when they comment, at least within the sequencing of the comments in any one thread. I think this was done to help improve the quality of the conversation, even before the removal of the vote totals next to each comment.
In case you're interested, here's the shipwreck:

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=North+Sentinel+Island&ll=11...
Gitlab is easy to set up and it works really well. It has a much cleaner and pleasant interface as well (especially since GitHub ruined theirs about a month ago).
Go like CSP for Python
Outage? Or Maintenance?
These are two different things.
Pygal - A python svg graph plotting library
I've been seeing this recently (past month) as well on 237, along with another coworker.
> However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support
> from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed
> federation support, then they killed it altogether)

Federation support was temporarily disabled, then re-enabled once they got spam filtering in place. Currently, XMPP works perfectly with a Gmail account.
It turns out that, while wealth and intelligence are uncorrelated in most studies, income and intelligence are positively correlated.

Wealth is dominated by inheritance and outliers, so this is less surprising than it first appears.
LaTeX is not the lingua franca of Biology/Chemistry. Nonetheless, I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, and spent all of maybe one and a half days getting all of the citations correct, figures on the correct page, etc. Honestly, thanks to LaTeX and a lot of not-stressing-out about things (I wrote it while on vacation in Hawaii), I did my thesis painlessly in about a week, and didn't really understand what the fuss was about.

I would add "Death March" by Edward Yourdon, which should be read even if you aren't in the computer industry.
Microsoft owns the video game business? They have a small fraction of the whole pie. They don't own anything. Their Xbox One screw-up and their embarrassing about-face showed how truly tenuous their position is.

Android, iOS, free to play, Facebook / web platforms, Ouya and the coming onslaught of embedded video game technology into TV's and other solo Android machines, Valve's console entry, Steam, Nintendo, Sony; publishers like Activision etc; indie producers like Mojang etc; and on and on and on and on. Microsoft is just one big player in a very large market.

Microsoft is in a position of weakness in gaming. If the Xbox One doesn't sell on par with the PlayStation 4, or if it doesn't sell in volumes at least on par with the 360, they're going to very quickly find themselves on the outside looking in just like in mobile (lackluster sales will also take down the Kinect platform).
I really couldn't imagine that Yahoo would be liable for copyright infringement on user submitted content. Assuming they have a process for Porn Companies to submit DMCA Takedown notices, it seems Yahoo and Tumblr would be protected from being sued for infringement by the DMCA Safe-Harbor Provision[1].

[1] http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID127
They just started charging for back-ups this month on DO. It is 20% of the cost of the droplet. So on a 512MB VM it is a dollar a month.
"Ten years ago Microsoft was just getting into the video game business, now they essentially own it"

The facts say otherwise:

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250111/2012-year-on-year-sal...
Would LOVE to hear more about your experience with OT— what specific challenges you faced, how you pulled it off etc :)
I used dd booting from a USB stick to transfer a Windows install from hard drive to SSD this weekend - there are a number of steps that can be done beforehand to tighten up the size of the final output. These steps are also useful for virtual machines, but they tend to take quite a while...

(1) Defrag - built-in / maybe SysInternals contig http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428

(2) Defrag the page file - SysInternals PageDefrag http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426

(3) Zero unused space - SysInternals SDelete http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.asp...

(4) Shrink volume (if backup is filesystem-aware, and disk is one large volume) - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg309169.aspx

(5) After transfer, expand volume to fit target disk

Pretty much any utility automating these steps is acquired by the various virtualization vendors, or heads directly to the enterprise market (kind of like how inexpensive screencast creation software always disappears!).
At a speaking engagement by James Lovell, I heard him describe the emergency procedure for navigating that they did with Apollo 13. There was a large round port window facing forward with a line engraved across the middle. Line that up with Earth's terminator line like cross hairs. Fire the main engine by hand. That's it. And it worked.
You can't roll out regular ads on their porn/nsfw blogs. That will destroy their relationship with advertisers or result in steep pricing discounts.
As a smaller game developer I have to say that the whole free model of games worries me frankly.

At minimum it has made me more cautious with my decision to bring a title to iOS due to the overwhelming expectation now that the game be free. If you want an example of this check out the youtube comments of the official tiny thief trailer. A game that debuted at $2.99. When I last looked there were an overwhelming amount complaining about how "the game needs to be free"...

As a larger issue I'm a little more worried about how this might end in a deterioration of the quality of experience on the iOS platform? Looking at that image of top paid vs top grossing, one might ask the question in 5-10 years will we be talking about candy crush? hay day? conversely how about Minecraft? Plants vs. Zombies?
Why? They do maintenance at different points throughout the year.
It will still show up in tag searches, and Tumblr doesn't have any other kind of search.
I think you are missing the point. There's no argument that new authors can sell a ton of books given the right inputs. What the article is saying is that you can sell a lot of shit to people with a fanbase. The point is proven with an overlooked book that was critically acclaimed but ignored by the public, but once tied to Rowling is now a best-seller.

Off the top of my head, in the book world, Stephen King is one of those people with that type of fanbase. I think a lot of people agree that he's a fine writer but there's a lot of junk mixed in with his good stuff - yet even the junk still rockets up the best seller list just because[1]. Stephanie Meyer can do this as well, and critics have said she's not a very good writer at all (ironically Stephen King said this too).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6TRVXG4kQE
NYC, or at least Manhattan, has had a law requiring underground utilities since 1888!
If the risk and time-adjusted reward is greater than $60,000, probably.

But in the long term, the cost structure of online courses is radically different than in-person. I would expect institutions that don't adopt to fail in the long term, as new providers with the lower cost structure enter and dominate; classic disruption. Their strategy right now would have been like if Apple released the iPad for $1,599 instead of $499 out of fear of cannibalization of their laptop market. If there is a way of offering a substitute at radically lower cost, somebody is going to cannibalize, it's just a question of who. If Universities don't do it to themselves, they should expect a slow and steady decline.
On the topic of fake road signs, there's the famous story of Los Angeles artist Richard Ankrom making and installing a perfectly-crafted modification to a freeway sign on the 110 to provide better directions to I-5. For months nobody realized the sign was "fake". Caltrans ended up liking the sign and left it up for 8 years before replacing it with a "real" one.

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-12-31/la-life/richard-ankrom-s-...
Showing is different than telling.

People will show how focused they are, or frustrated, with small facial expressions. They are unlikely to talk about these transient states. But, these states will tell you: this bit of code is ugly; I'm tired and need a break; Wow, that's great!
1. Kudos for the very interesting initiative!

2. I was looking for a "natural syntax programming language" on Google and this is what showed up as the first result http://bglang.org/

3. If I might add something, I think what something like this would need is flexibility i.e. a more "freestyle" way of writing expressions. It would not only be much easier to use by children, it would also be a nice technical challenge for the language designer.

Some examples:

* sum of all numbers from 1 to 10

* x is 3; y is 15; print their greatest common divisor

* if folder has file 'file.txt' then put x in file

* print 5th fibonacci number

* c is circle, diameter 10; C is square, side 9; print maximum area c, C

* show bigger number 2/3, 1/2
sex.com? I have tried that domain wondering who has probably paid gazillions expecting a pile of rubbish, but...
Have you settled on a good workflow for ClojureScript projects? cljsbuild at least lets you amortize JVM startup time with the auto mode, but the Write-Compile-Test loop (as Joel Spolsky calls it) still feels a little more sluggish than what I'm used to in other contexts.
Having a portfolio of your work? It's a good way to start marketing yourself.
Tried fastmail and wasn't impressed. Rackspace email is a great choice. Its cheap and fast. Outages are rare. Has active sync support and IMAP push works on android/iPhone.

Rackspace also allows you to run exchange mailboxes alongside IMAP if you have a few users who are still tied to outlook.
How to Build a Software Consultancy in the Middle of Nowhere
Sticks, stones, but names are not useful to me
>Metro. Kinect. Office Ribbon. Bing. ARM Surface. The list goes on to almost every product MS

I assume when you say Metro, you mean on Windows 8. Metro on WP and Xbox is really great, and I think 8.1 will fix a lot of problems with Metro on 8. Metro as a design language is, IMO, really good. Implementation on Windows, not so much.

Kinect? The fastest selling consumer device in history? The numbers speak for themselves.

Office Ribbon is a step forward in UI design for menu systems. Looking for a good resource on their thought process behind it, but you can see a partial explanation here. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/09/14/467126.as... The ribbon backlash seems more against the fact that the UI changed than that the ribbon is bad UI design.

Bing is a long term play and I think it's starting to pay off with FB, Apple, and Yahoo deals, not to mention the deep integratin of Bing services in Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone.

Arm Surface was a disaster.

>Microsoft needs to stop pushing products for the benefit of Microsoft. I'd recommend the following: put up a poll and let the general public decide on issues like Metro - and then follow those results, even if it means throwing Metro out of the desktop. Microsoft needs to listen to customers simply because other businesses are listening to Microsoft's customers, and those customers are leaving.

Design by committee is terrible. Design by the general population is even worse.
Not sure where you got 28 hours (35 mins ago) from when it hasn't been even 27 hours yet (at this moment).
It's beginning to remind me of Fahrenheit 451.
Everything can be deciphered completely contextually based on location though. None of these are insurmountable problems.

I wouldn't claim an ASL recognizer would suddenly identify BSL or anything wacky like that. Systems can even be trained (or generalized) down to a per-signer level. You could even have "Joe Pikachu's Generic Gesture Translator" too.

Think solutions, not problems.
Don’t Follow The Herd
Oh, for sure, I'm not one of the "enraged" people; I just wanted to point out that it's not just a matter of changing a flag.
I would liken it to the Game of Go (pun intended). You have a very small number of elements: chan, go, >!, <!, alts!. The learning curve is a bit steep because you have invest some time unlearning patterns you've picked up from traditional UI programming. But once you cross over the hump and you realize what is possible with just these few tools a whole vista of possibilities opens up. I'm sure the fans of go-lang would agree.

Another analogy - Alan Kay compares software engineering to architecture and how so much engineering is brute force (think pyramids). core.async (really CSP) is like an arch (think gothic cathedral). Common UI patterns no longer seem arduous - and UI patterns which once seemed far out reach can be accomplished with a reasonable amount of engineering effort.
Charging up front isn't always a great business model though. They could sell a few thousand copies of the app, no one else wants it, and now they have to support a product they will never get revenue from again. With a product like this I'd prefer to see a subscription model assuring me they were getting paid regularly and there's more chance they'd stick around.
I'm not surprised. Their time-tested strategy of blatant vendor lock-in is being disrupted by competitors providing the same kind of software for free - google docs, firefox/chrome, linux.

After the upcoming "adjustments," they should be able to survive at a somewhat healthy level, but they will have to accept lower revenue and margin as a persistent reality.
why is a press release for a paths(?) clone so high on the FP with only 10points?
Or sign up with an extremely well established existing one.

http://www.dhdmedia.com/

Spun off from Danni's Hard Drive a decade ago, they have as much experience in that very problematic space as anyone.
Would there be any chance that in their isolation that different diseases evolved that the rest of the world doesn't have immunity to? It would seem to me that us wiping them out with one of our diseases isn't the only thing we should be worried about.
Yeah - blocking adult stuff from a "safe mode" search doesn't seem like a particularly bad thing, but Tumblr seems to just completely make stuff disappear, rather than making users aware that there is other content available which they could see if they left safe mode. This seems less than ideal - if content is being removed from searches, the user should be informed.
"Team player" is code for the middling level of ambition (MacLeod Clueless). Not a disengaged doesn't-give-a-shit clock-puncher, but not attuned/savvy enough to focus only on projects conferring personal career benefit.

It has little to do with whether one actually works well in a team. It's just a codeword for something that's hard to describe and somewhat socially unacceptable (a middling level of ambition that only exists in fresh college grads who haven't figured out who they are yet) to want.