skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Steve Ballmer started at Microsoft in January 2000 [1]. Since then the S&P 500 has gained 15 points, the Nasdaq has lost 12, and Microsoft...about 45 [2]. Thus MSFT has under-performed the S&P 500 by over 60 points and the Nasdaq by over 33.

This does not show that Ballmer is crap. Just that Microsoft has been crap since Ballmer took over. Generously: he has been unable to arrest the disintegration of shareholder value.

UPDATE: Out of the 3 395 overlapping 20 trading day time periods between 7 January 2000 and 19 July 2013 MSFT outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) in 1 543 of those periods, or 45% of the time. Thus, if you were to flip a coin on any trading day between those dates and, were it to come up heads, buy and hold MSFT for 20 trading days you would, on average, make money on 9 out of 20 days. If you made money you made, on average, 4.9%. If you lost money you lost, on average, 4.6%. Comparable statistics for SPYs are a 59% win rate (3 out of 5 times), 3.2% up, 4.4% down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer

[2] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
Since I use Google Apps for my email, I could easily move my mail to another service without telling people my new address but Fastmail doesn't seem to support using your own domain. Do you know any service like Fastmail but with domain support?

Edit: The "family" package offers this: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/family.html

Edit Again: I should have poked around more, it's included in the personal package too.
I recommend this BBC documentary which tries to shed some light on the matter.
Fracking: The New Energy Rush - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjgzrmoLc7g
How about a blanket pardon for anyone convicted of any anti-homosexuality law, and a formal apology for the persecution?
I'm not sure if everyone sees your sarcasm here...
Good to know about this alternative. SML was a great language, and deserves to live on. OCaml is not really a successor to SML because of its object-oriented features and its lack of backward compatibility to SML.
> it costs a one time $100 charge to become an Apple developer

Just a nitpick, $100 per year last I checked, hardly a 'one time charge.'
It doesn't matter if you don't find yourself, as long as your search term (your name) matched. So as long as some one knows your name (and that you might Google yourself), there is a good chance you'd see it.
Perhaps you should give these people the benefit of the doubt before attacking them? "Methane existed before" is very simplistic. Has the amount increased? Has the affected area increased? Is there a change in prevalent isotopes that might give a clue as to the origin of the methane? Is the change enough to put the level over EPA standards?

There isn't really any question that some people have seen an increase in methane in their water supply (unless you believe these people have been living without usable water for decades but only cared to do anything about it once fracking came to town). Working out why is more difficult.

Here is one study (insert usual disclaimer about relying too much on a single paper) http://www.pnas.org/content/108/20/8172.long

Our results show evidence for methane contamination of shallow drinking-water systems in at least three areas of the region and suggest important environmental risks accompanying shale-gas exploration worldwide.
I suspect they initially thought they could just bully the guy. By the time they understood he actually was on solid ground (it was the 90s, lawyers didn't know anything about our intertubes), it was too late: smallbiz owners like Mr. Nissan can be the hardest mofos once they get personal. I bet he's still proud he didn't accept their offers.

It's old news anyway, very well-known. I'm always surprised when stuff like this comes up on news sites, I tend to forget the web is full of goddamn kids these days ;)
How is that a factor? That means that anyone can take my domain by registering a company with the same name and suing me for it.
Indeed, we'll know their real intentions once they interfere with those services, however a bad precedent has already been created: their jabber/xmpp service.

Anyone with Android phones, what's the default way to check your emails, IMAP? If yes, then there is still some hope. :-)
Perl startups - Nestoria
Dean Oliver works at ESPN now. He's considered the Bill James of Basketball stats[1], though he doesn't focus exclusively on that sport.

Certainly there is a lot of ludditism at ESPN concerning statistical analysis, but you might say that their building a prestigious niche of high minded sports analysis. Also, an affiliation with ESPN, I think reaches more sports fans than an affiliation with the NYT, so if he's looking to switch focus to sports, then that's a pretty compelling reason too.

[1] One example: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/posts.html?pg=3
That headline is horribly wrong. You can't catch cancer, since your immune system will recognize the cells as foreign and kill them.

What the article really says is, that the vaccine was contaminated with a cancer-causing virus.
Replace one proprietary service with another...
Bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice sold for $11.5 (126315 BTC)
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Thanks for speaking of your experiences with the rogue spy apparatchik which has recently reared its ugly head and I'd also like to thank you for running a Tor node.

Together we stand, for freedom. For America.
Why is this at the bottom?
Interview: Rand Fishkin CEO of Moz on Lean Marketing - Leanbound.com
No reason not to use Ubuntu. Huge community, up-to-date packages, every dev tool should work out of the box.

You might want to take a look at http://elementaryos.org/ (it's based on ubuntu too, so almost everything will just work the same). Not stable yet though.
Although SML is such a beautiful and pragmatic language and has many Compilers and Runtimes, I am not aware of any real world projects with impact other than the well-known SML compilers (Mlton, SMLNJ, MosML, Poly ... to only name a few).

Usage of SML results in very short, readable and efficient programs, so I wonder why there is only so little industry adoption.
It falls firmly in the "I'm a 14 year old libertarian" category.
...why was he afraid of XCode?
'Detroit is basically broke': cuts, cuts and cuts to follow bankruptcy filing
Another cute trick is to put places on google maps at 0,0 or another strategic location, so that anyone looking at a place with that location will find it. Last I looked Ace Advertising Signs had put a place at 0,0, it's been removed now I think but you can still see the icon at certain zoom levels on classic maps as the tiles are cached:

https://www.google.com/maps?q=0,0&ll=0,0&z=17&output=classic
Show HN: Daily Done
I wrote this over the course of 2 nights, about a year apart. It's mostly an experiment with knockoutjs and local storage. Feedback, issues, or pull requests welcome. URL detection seems a little janky, but regexes are not my strong suite. Learned a few things along the way, like IE does not support local storage when run from a file system. Thanks!
TL;DR: the CLI is the specification, of which the CLR is Microsoft's own implementation. Another/the other implementation of the CLI is Mono.

Which begs the question: you've written "Microsoft's CLI", which does make sense because they were the ones who've come up with it, but can't that be interpreted as a synonym for CLR? Maybe that's what 616c meant.
I wrote this over the course of 2 nights, about a year apart! It's mostly an experiment with knockoutjs and local storage. Feedback, issues, or pull requests are welcome. I am sure there is much room for improvement :) I turned off user defined key entry for now. URL detection seems a little janky, but regexes are not my strong suit. Learned a few things along the way, like IE does not support local storage when run from a file system. Thanks!
The IP "location" doesn't say anything.

My Azure IP shows up in Seattle, yet the connection goes to Amsterdam. What you're seeing is where the owner of the IP is located; that is not necessarily the same as the server.
A bunch of strangers all over the world conversing on the Internet about whether a primitive tribe ought to be contacted.

This really does seem like science fiction.

In comparison to them, we are like godly beings, communicating in some unfathomably high-tech way to discuss their fate.
And Reddit is not nearly as left-wing as you think. It's populated by tens of millions of people now, all around the political spectrum. If anything, they tend to swing left on social policy issues, but they are not far off from the national average in economic policy. The Obama love last election had a lot more to do with the lack of any reasonable republican candidate than it did with the political makeup of Reddit. Remember, Ron Paul actually received serious support from Reddit.
This article should be #1 on HN right now but has been disappeared.

Shenanigans has been called.
Haha. Those were some terrible pitches (sorry!). We have something similar on our IRC bot. Can be hilarious sometimes. :D

<me> !movieplot

<•rbot> Summary: He's a scrappy voodoo gangster from the Mississippi delta. She's a high-kicking mute pearl diver with the power to bend mens minds. They fight crime.

<•rbot> Summary: He's a Nobel prize-winning white trash rock star looking for a cure to the poison coursing through his veins. She's an enchanted African-American detective from the wrong side of the tracks. They fight crime.

etc etc.
I remember an old Vladimir Nabokov quote that is very apropos to this. I do not remember the quote exactly and i do not have the book with me, so I cannot look it up, but it went something like this:

"The play was in perfect harmony with the modern rules of drama and storytelling or, in other words, it was perfectly idiotic."

I read this quote about 10 years ago in a Nabokov short story but I keep getting reminded of it whenever I see a modern movie. And they are getting very idiotic. The strict plot structure is making characters say or do stupid things just so the action can follow the predefined plot lines. This really prevents one from creating believable characters. All the reverses (the false victories and false losses) often make characters reverse themselves until they become mostly unbelievable to anyone that tries to remember the entire movie from beginning to end.
I don't think we were discounting the rule of law. We were going with the 'currently some western governments will force you to reveal your password' legal reality.
I'd argue in my case I should in fact be driving 80 mph a lot of the time, because everyone else is, and it is safer to go with the flow of traffic than it is to follow the letter of the law. As I'm sure you're aware, non-head-on collisions become more dangerous when the delta between speeds of the colliding objects are divergent more so than they are impacted by absolute ground speed of the colliding objects. In fact, even the DMV tells you to disregard the speed limit if it is at odds with the natural flow of traffic speed.

FWIW, I only ever drive 80 mph in 65 mph zones on large 5+-ish lane freeways. On non-freeway roads, I don't speed.
Most of the people who would be using SML are using Haskell, hence why Robert Harper is so bitter, constantly writing blog posts about how much "Haskell sucks", and how "unsafe" it is.

edit: or OCaml, or F#.
Gmail’s compose window now has a full-screen option
Read and liked them both, thanks!
I run a small cleaning business that brings me in some passive income, but when i was at the start i had this client that i eventually refused to do work for because he wasn't worth the hassle. The bill for a months cleaning of his office was £500-ish. The guy was part of a family that owned an Oil and Gas equipment company that must turn over hundreds of millions of pounds per year, and that guy REALLY REALLY didnt want to pay his £500 bill for an office clean. He must have spent about 10+ hours going back and forth through emails and phone calls querying 2-3 hours here, the cost of cleaning supplies, complaints about the cleaners i'd sent, just to get his bill down, in the end his bill was down to around £400 and he eventually paid it, but he'd wasted his own time and the same amount of my time.

Now i consider 10+ hours of MY time to be worth WAY more than £500 due to what i can earn doing my usual consulting and also because i dont want to deal with douchebags like him, and what i make per year is insignificant compared to the company that he helps to run, so i never understood why the hell he's kicking up shit over a damned cleaning bill. Infuriated me to no end.

Now i only have clients that pay their automatically issued invoices every month without issue, they're happy and i'm happy, i get my beer money and i can concentrate on my consulting instead of my side business.
Thanks, I read one of them and enjoyed it, although it wasn't an instant "get me the next one, too" experience. But I might eventually read the other ones, too.
My workflow v3: full coding stack
It's not that they are so formulaic, it's that they are so identical. It's as if every one who used bootstrap for web design also used identical color schemes and layouts.

Take a look at the upcoming "RIP Department." It's like someone just took the Men in Black script and replaced all references to aliens with references to the undead. It's the same movie!
It's quite strange to see Carlos Ghosn described as an Arab. As far as I know, he has never spoke publicly about Israël.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn
> I'm always surprised when stuff like this comes up on news sites, I tend to forget the web is full of goddamn kids these days ;)

Yeah, they wouldn't know a Fuzzball if it bit them on the ass, and nobody knows the true meaning of Flag Day anymore (uh, either of them).
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This is the culmination of a very nice subthread. While there is certainly a huge need for a systemic fix, the subthread shows how technology can help us fight the problem on a temporary case-by-case basis. Brilliant!
I think Bill Simmons is entertaining, but I'm not sure that he's great to pair with a real statistician. He makes a million assertions a minute. I guess Simmons has done a decent job of interviewing statistical experts at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I think he's better by himself or with a group of guys that don't need verification to let his assertions stand in the conversation.

I do think that the Henry Abbott + John Hollinger[1] dynamic was good since Abbott is more of a curious amateur type and willing to withhold judgement until the facts come in. But if Silver is a baseball guy (some of the stuff that Silver's done on basketball isn't very good, I don't think he's really immersed in the sport), then I wouldn't necessarily expect the paths of those two guys to cross much.

[1] Though I have reservations about some of Hollinger's work, especially PER, which is just a linear weights metric with weights apparently chosen to coincide with conventional wisdom on the value of players. There are superior player evaluation metrics, but PER is very marketable to normal fans. Hollinger does seem to know his stuff though, and he's done a great job in Memphis thus far. It's just unfortunate that he got famous for a ho-hum metric.
> People who say Ballmer is a bad CEO based on the stock price really aren't paying attention

Most of the criticism here doesn't mention the stock price, but since you bring it up...

> He took over at the height of the tech bubble. Microsoft's PE (and everything else) was a joke.

Even if you set your start date as the collapse of the tech bubble in 2002, Microsoft's stock price has remained pretty flat. You might argue that the market was still overvaluing Microsoft in 2002, but perhaps that was because it overvalued the ability of its CEO to grow profits and return cash to shareholders.

> Since he took over revenue and profits have increased by an impressive amount

How much of the increase in profits is due to the Windows/Office cash cow, which would have existed under any other CEO? For the remaining growth in profits, how much money was invested to achieve that growth? After all, any CEO can increase company profit by $1 billion per year - he just needs to put $20 billion in a bank account.
most here would keep his/her document versioned in subversion or git. I don't think technically minded individuals don't confuse syncing and backups (or versioning). This however does not apply to non-technical people. That is where dropbox is a win, since they do versioning.
Sorry for being a bit tangential, but I'm always astonished how people are still using checks for business. Especially in the US, where it seems standard industry practice of assholes to bounce checks.

(I read about France still being in love with checks as well, although they have basically your standing with banks depend on you handling checks well. So even if they're still using a horribly outdated method of payment, at least they attach the right consequences to fraud.)
yeah I love how they whine over missing cookies. Instead of trying to improve the internet they prefer to accuse Mozilla and distort anything behind their decisions. But... Why am I not surprised?
I think I read that E's promises came out of experience with UI programming too -- that they invented http://erights.org/elib/distrib/pipeline.html for the sake of sanely programming snappy UIs for Xanadu.

Sounds like I gave up too easily on queuing and pruning events, or it was the particular platform (touch tracking on Nexus 7 and first-gen iPad).

Thanks for the experience report. :-) It might help me remember this when I get back to http://wry.me/hacking/lissajous.html to finish & polish -- I let it get all cut-and-pastey in doing drag-controls for the first time.
What was the situation with Dodge? I can remember in the early-late 90s (heh, 1997is?) that dodge.com belonged to some financial group. The actual Dodge car company had 4adodge.com, I believe.
For full (or even better) Dropbox-like solution, check also AjaXplorer[1] which is a PHP file manager.

It supports zipping/unzipping, file preview, editing, sharing and many other things.

And best of all - it's open source and you can create custom plugins for it.

[1] http://ajaxplorer.info/
Phonegap 3 launch
"As an example, if I was proposing to build a website capable of creating an additional $100,000 of profit annually, I would ask the client to make an investment of $40,000 in their website."

You can only do this if what you offer is not a commodity. Otherwise, what you charge is the minimum of expected value and the market rate for the work you do.
Over the years I've been sort of refining what you get when you search my name.

So if you search for my name on either Google or DuckDuckGo now, the top 5-6 results are about me. It's mostly just Facebook/Twitter/GitHub/LinkedIn and other things like that, but they are all me.

I guess that is positive when I'm finished with school and need to start applying for jobs :-)

I'm not sure it will even pay off, it's not that you need to do that much, just try to get stuff you do not want to show up removed.

Covering up something stupid (with any kind of spread) probably isn't going to work. But if you have a completely unrelated result showing up for a hobby of yours that doesn't really need to be on 'your' front page then you can make small edits to make it rank worse. Perhaps remove your name, or write it differently just that one time.

Given a bit of time you can end up with only the results you want, provided you aren't known enough for someone to be writing about what you are doing with your life.
Grandmaster Judit, Grandmaster Susan, International Master Sophia, and their parents, Klára and László Polgár might disagree.

László Polgár had a thesis that one does simply raise a prodigy and managed to do pretty well on that score, given that he and his wife Klára proceeded to then raise three female chess prodigies.

Of course one swallow does not a summer make, so it could just be blind luck, but it is an interesting and fairly persuasive case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
> Modern classification schemes are so arbitrary and error-prone as to be essentially just a painful way to satisfy scientists' compulsion to shove things into neat little cubbies and has the negative side-effect of scaring students away from an otherwise fascinating subject.

What do you mean by "modern classification schemes"? If anything, molecular phylogenetics helped clarify earlier attempts at classification which used common morphological features.
I have a hard time believing you since minimal Belgium legal wage is around 1200 euros / month before taxes. And software developer is hardly a blue-collar job. Either you work part-time or your being exploited. You're trolling and you know it, HN is not Reddit so please stop.
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Nokia Lumia 1020 Overview & Features That Make It A Superb Gadget
Selection bias. You don't remember the films from the past that were bland pap. You're also taking the best 10 films from a decade (say) and comparing them to what came out this year or in the last 2 years.
The point is you get what you give. If you want a "better" service, it's going to cost you. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
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He Loves Bees: An interview with Xbox's experimental storyteller
Snap has the same problem. If anything, Yesod is where you're the least on your own because of the Persistent integration.
Half-agreed. I still like him because he's the only rich and powerful person who would do that ridiculous dance on stage for the whole world to see, only in the name of people like me, me, me!

But "bad CEO"? Come on! If you look beyond the HN filter bubble, he has definitively diversified MS beyond its early Windows/Office shackles, increased revenues consistently and made (most of) the new divisions very profitable.

And if you think there's no "HN bubble", ask yourself why there's this huge front-page thread about MSFT tanking 10% but little talk about GOOG tanking 14%.
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No you would not multiply the total cubic feet by 2 and divide by 54 to find the total cubic yards. If you multiply by 2 then you will throw your calculations off.

The table is figuring a cross sectional area then adding the next cross section area. At that stage it should divide by 2 to find the 'average' area for a section but it waits until the end to do this by dividing by 54 (or double the cubic feet in a cubic yard).

A1 = H1 x W1
A2 = H2 x W2
(A1 + A2) x L1 = 2V1 (approximate)
A3 = H3 x W3
(A2 + A3) x L2 = 2V2
...
sum of volumes = 2V
approximate volume = 2V / 54 = approximate cubic yards.
Well, the UK has about 20% of the population of the US, so it is proportional
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Go through a stack ranking where you get a bad review simply because "there are too many good developers on the team" before you say that it is a nonsensical criticism.

Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.
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