skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've used this before in the past, but kinda fell off for whatever reason. It's really great, though. Very simple and clean.
What is interesting is that over the last ten years microsoft has been unable to win markets with its time tested strategy: keeping at it until it conquers the market. It's because some very competent competitors have arisen that move faster and better than microsoft. consequently its late-to-market-but-persistent strategy fails.

Seemingly the only way a company can retain its leadership is by innovating and then leading the market. Microsoft hasn't been that good at genuine market innovation (we're talking revolutions), so unless it can use its strong stance in markets it leads currently, the future isn't looking all that rosy for microsoft..
Rejuvenating the ternary conditional with optionals
When you said it was relevant to HN I thought you were going to say because the same phenomenon happens with start-ups. Being good isn't always enough, usually you need a little luck as well.
I dunno. Given the ability for Microsoft to just up their CAL licenses for their business buyers and pull revenue literally out of their ass... all the while shoving Windows 8 down their partners thoats??

Microsoft is still big. As a business, they remain profitable. They have plenty of time to turn the ship around.

Their business decisions may have been terrible these past years, but they're still profitable, still making money nonetheless.
You must have had a very atypical childhood and never interact with kids because there are tons of art supplies, picture books and "count the apples" type arithmetic books that are only for kids.
I'm with you. What we're witnessing here it's the confluence of two different trends. First the push to mobile, as everyone has been pointing out for the last few years (yawn) and secondly the plateau in HW requirements. We've reached a point where our PCs are powerful enough to do everything we need them to, so there's no need to upgrade them (yes, we still need affordable 4k displays). This has happened for two reasons:

1) What were once desktop apps have become online services so as to both reduce shipping time and reach a wider audience (browser improvements obviously are the main force behind this even being possible)

2) Apps that were previously the preserve of powerful desktop computers are now available on mobile phones (who needs that photo-editing software when I can apply a filter to the pic I've just snapped with my phone?)
Splice.io - erlang style actors and distributed coroutines in python
The surface RT was targeted at Consumers, I don't think the lack of joining active directory would be something most people would miss. I don't think most people would care about the Windows store lock down, provided that the store has good apps in it. They were trying to use the fact that it has a Real copy of Office on it as a selling feature, except that Office on the RT's ran really poorly.
> The sad part is that there is never any solid evidence for these claims. Of the hundreds and thousands of people who must be involved in keeping a secret like this under wraps, how come nobody has leaked anything?

That's why [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mib+device&safe=off&client=u...
Funny linking to a blog that's now down. Stock prices are public info.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT
That would be true for the old media. OTOH, online advertising is extremely data-oriented, especially in the US. Most business decisions are based on data. Businesses may be using wrong models or assumptions about the correlation or causation between advertising and revenue, but there is a very strong effort to analyze data for revenue growth.
Right. More specifically, here's what's actually going on:

10% of Tumblr is porn, right? And it's not amateur porn, or "oh hey I reblogged a butt." No, the vast majority of that 10% is one thing and one thing only: mirrored rips of full galleries from paysites. Illegal, copyright-infringing rips.

Basically, if Tumblr had any sort of scalable process to distinguish these from their other content, they'd just shut them down immediately. Using Tumblr just to bulk-rehost copyright-infringing images is 100% against their TOS, that much should be obvious.

Basically, Yahoo gave Tumblr some good advice here: if they don't want to fundamentally restrict their users from posting adult content, then it's all Tumblr can do (legally) to sweep these gallery-rip Tumblrs under the rug, so that you can only find them by seeing a reblog from them or by knowing their URL (which also, a lot of the time, means "by following a link from a porn subreddit.") It's not that they're adult; it's that they're in breach of copyright, and giving any public-facing path to them is the same as endorsing them (thus opening Yahoo to being sued for that infringement.)

This whole thing isn't about "OH NO A BUTT"; it's more for the same reason Mega's internal search won't show you "Adobe CS6 Master Suite [cw33t].rar", even though you could get that from them with the right URL. Hosting something is one thing; advertising it is another. Tumblr's emphasis on free speech is a mask for one thing here: they want safe harbor provisions to apply to them as far as this content goes, by not giving it any attention/promotion.

EDIT: I reposted this to Tumblr, expanded and phrased in a slightly more Tumblr-audience-targeted manner, explaining what safe-harbor provisions are and such. http://leviaul.tumblr.com/post/55886555106/you-guys
It's interesting how people are willing to shell out so much on in-app purchases for games in particular.

Not judging at all, of course. I play D&D, League of Legends, and Magic the Gathering, all three of which have (to varying extents) an illusion of being free. I've spent large amounts of money on each game and I don't even regret it!

Valve has it down with TF2 and hats. From my understanding it was somewhat of an accident (If I recall correctly, a Valve employee at a talk I attended said that they weren't expect hats to be so huge), yet it's another great example of how much potential free games have to rake in loads of cash. This is certainly the direction I'll go in if I ever plan on making games (unless I want to do a legitimately 100% free game for fun)
Ask HN: Best way to find a better job without contacts
I lack the contacts for finding a better job in my local area. Does anyone have any tips for finding a better job in the short term without spending months making new contacts? I'm tied to my location for another 10 months due to renting.
USAirways – Can an airline operate like this?
>XBox 360 at least had a GPU that was 2x stronger than the PS3 GPU [et al]

And did it matter at all? From what I remember of this current generation's history, if games looked any different on the PS3 than the 360, the developers blamed it on the tools and how difficult the PS3 was to program for, not on the weaker hardware. Developers made cross-platform titles for the Xbox first and ported to the PS3 because Xbox was easier.

When I was 16 years old I argued console hardware specs. These days I don't hear many experience gamers mention it at all, because when it comes down to it, minor differences in specs doesn't really matter.
The problem is the long term run. At the moment they are really profitable, but with the switching of the market from pc-leadership to tablet-smartphone-smartdevices leadershipt they are in big risks.
>IF it had domain-joining support

Perhaps Microsoft's problem is that features like "domain-joining support" make their products "compelling."
Microsoft needs to pull out of mobile and tighten their grip on the desktop market. I can say anecdotally that the only reason many people stay with Windows is for games.

I'd like to see Windows rebranded as "The Gaming OS which does much more than just games". They need to keep the value of Windows tied to the value of Steam. This means bending over backwards to the needs of game developers and cementing the expectation that you need Windows if you want games before that expectation goes away.

This may even mean marketing themselves to Mac and Linux users as the OS you should dual boot if you want to play games.
What a crazy thought.
Blogspot is one of them.
Agreed, but still interesting to see how they setup their fundraising.
How To Look Good Online
Great way to put it.

I think this is a part of a larger problem. A lot of IT interviews are based on a gigantic set of "ideal criteria" that no single person can realistically fulfill in its entirety. Because of that every hire is a compromise. Because of that who is hired in the end becomes a subject of subjective and irrational judgements.

In my opinion, having a realistic set of minimum requirements (which are actually needed to do the job) and looking for candidates to match every single one of them provides a much better and less biased approach. It can also help to design an interview process in a rational manner.
Remember that this cannot be run on a live system, since you'll get a corrupt image. Thus it's more useful for infrequent maintenance tasks than as part of a regular regime.
Why does Google Docs have so many ways of sharing?
That, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work on the Android client (did that for the webapp). I'd give the app a bad rating for becoming more and more crappy, but I have no G+ account, cannot have a G+ account and therefor are unable to participate..
Prime Directive, folks. Respect it!
I suppose there are already templating abilities written into the popular code editors, but something that maybe takes the first two or three lines of what you've written (maybe a common JDBC connection style block) and identifies it as such. I'm not sure if it would be incredibly useful but it would be interesting to see what came of it.
By contrast, if success was driven disproportionately by a few early downloads, subsequently amplified by social influence, the outcomes would be largely random and only become more unequal as the social feedback became stronger.

So if you have 10 hipsters out of 30,000 as opposed to 9, there is a better chance that the songs that make it up to the top of the charts are wildly different. This does not constitute randomness. Having more people who appreciate one sound as opposed to another will give you a different result, and quite predictable. Unless of course the randomness is with the number of hipsters you are likely to get per sampling of population.
This is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Just zoom out to the ten-year chart:

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT
A ridiculous and poorly written article which sets out to claim that success is largely a fluke and has not much to do with intrinsic talent, rather if you are initially successful this tends to produce even more success in some kind of gravitational effect. It fails to explore this idea in depth or prove the point. I contend that nearly the opposite is true.

Success certainly has an element of luck as well as initial advantages (rich parents, living in the right country ...). but I don't think that success can be maintained without ability, talent and hard work. So for Jobs, Dylan and Rowling, their first break may have been a fluke, (albeit one attained by hard work and persistence), but their continued success was due to talent rather than to some winner takes all effect.
I want to agree with you, but in the past hasn't a combination of high-end upgraders and improved manufacturing driven progress? Will enough people pay for a "4K" monitor to justify building whatever has to be built to make it practical?

I am seeing this: "These companies should feel ashamed that it took ~8 years to progress past the 30" 2560x1600 form factor to a $3,500 ASUS "4k" monitor. In 2013, a '4k' monitor on the desktop should be entry-level technology"

and wonder about the extent to which companies push consumers versus consumers pushing companies.
The market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult-content-friendly blogging platform to fill, I wonder why the startup scene here isn't jumping on that?

(I'd do it myself if I knew of any appropriate payment system; but my only payment systems experience is with paypal, who hate adult content more than the blog hosts do, and bitcoin, which is unheard of outside of geek and finance niches...)
As someone who's borderline ADHD and who frequently struggles with American social conventions (to the point where it's a significant stressor in my life), I'm much more threatened by people like Sarah than by Linus.

Sarah is probably more pleasant to deal with if you're socially skilled, but she demands the same thing in return, and will call you out---and apparently even go to the press---if she doesn't like how you interact with people. People like Linus will just pay attention to your actual point, and will look past the cultural subtleties of how you said something.

Every time Linus says something like, "shut the fuck up, Mauro", he's signalling that he wouldn't derail a conversation just because someone was slightly rude. For me, this means that I wouldn't need to stress over the wording of every email I send to Linus, because he's not going to care.

I'm not saying that politeness is bad---it's great if you're good at it---but random contributors enforcing politeness is toxic. Now, if I want to contribute to the kernel without getting publicly shamed on lkml, I have to be good at kernel development and at wording things in a way that's acceptable to people like Sarah. I don't think that's an improvement.
The RT had months to sink or swim on its own and was already something nobody wanted by the time you could order a Pro.

The market confusion between the two is enormous, and it's not going in the direction Microsoft wanted: I routinely run into people who are under the impression that all tablets with Windows that they see are crippled ARM devices and not usable computers. If tablets running Windows are Microsoft's future they badly poisoned the well with RT.
Play The One-Second Stopwatch Game
They have the wrong Steve.
Ex-CIA chief accuses Huawei of industrial espionage
Beer drinking king dies in competition tragedy
Yes, this is PR. But what else were this companies supposed to do?

If they disclosed any information, then they would get into a lot of trouble with the government and possible get arrested.
I've had an active developer program account since 2008. While various tools have gone offline now and then, and there are planned shutdowns around the holidays and during keynotes, this incident seems unique.

Wonder what's going on over there. This outage makes the provisioning portal inaccessible. That could mean very real work disruptions, since no new code signing credentials can be made.
Never seen that. All people I know who love programming even find time to do their own stuff on a 60 hour schedule.
It's not a real alternative, though. The feature of reposting with backlinks turns Tumblr from a basic imagelog hosting service into a very interconnected community.
Schneier: Counterterrorism Mission Creep
The piece I find most interesting here is not JK Rowling or book publishing, but the effects of 'intrinsic talent' and 'cumulative advantage' upon success.

The suggestion that the quality of my work might not contribute to my own success as much as I'd hope is disheartening.

I also wonder: how can I build up my own cumulative advantage?
We've benefited from everything moving to web - we have actual choice in operating systems now and it should only get better with more competition. Let's be honest, the PC market was not what I'd call innovative and healthy for the last decade.
The team at JPL that built Cassini will be out there too. From the announcement:

"Earth will be just 1.5 pixels wide, with the illuminated part of Earth less than a pixel, so the resulting mosaic will not show any features on Earth. But it's a chance to be part of a special portrait, to contemplate what we look like from interplanetary distances, and to celebrate the longevity of our Cassini spacecraft, which has been successfully orbiting Saturn for nine years."
Pull out of mobile? Meanwhile the entire world is pushing mobile market making a lot bigger than the desktop pc market? Not a really good idea. It would be a suicide and they know it, that's why they are putting billions of money in windows phone and nokia, they NEED at least a minimum marketshare (10%) in the mobile market
Precisely. Those who are ensconced and comfortable with the inertia of "good enough," may feel that way simply because they don't know how much they would enjoy a high-definition full-view desktop display because nothing like that exists.

I've said elsewhere that without the iPad 3, we'd still have 1024x768 on tablets and there would be those of us shouting for higher resolution tablets, only to be frustrated by counter-arguments of "1024x768 is fine!"

If you disagree with me--if you believe that a high-density large-profile desktop display is just plain silly--I hope that one day if and when we do actually see such a device become available, and you sit down in front of one and mutter, "wow!" that you will remember this conversation. :)
I hope it's something good. But, my guess is it won't be anything noticeable. Replacing that horrible Jive forum software would rock as it's awful.
> JS seems like such a hack.

That's not a good reason for advocating ClojureScript. Why not Dart? TypeScript? CoffeeScript? Tell me something good about core.async...

Edit: Really, downvotes?
The entire Apple dev center is down. That makes it impossible to download the iOS or Mac SDKs, including the iOS 7 beta. It's also not possible to provision new devices or update expired certificates. The developer forums are down too, which is somewhat frustrating since that's the only place we can discuss the still-under-NDA iOS 7.

iTunes connect appears to be up.

Apologies for those who posted this earlier. The headline gets more interesting as the outage continues.
It's not an email.
I am quite astonished at how slow the uptake of showing fractions on a number line is in school mathematics lessons in the United States. That is routine and has been routine for more than a generation in the countries with the best primary mathematics achievement around the world. I picked up some of this implicitly from my home environment just by looking at rulers in my dad's home workshop. (He had rulers with markings down to 1/32 of an inch, as I recall, certainly down to 1/16 of an inch.)

Even here on Hacker News, among fully grown adults, when people raise questions about explaining fractions, many comments leap immediately to pizza slices--a valid model of some fractions, but a very poor model for general understanding of fractions. I took great care to email one of the co-authors of the Art of Problem Solving textbook on Prealgebra

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...

while he was writing the book to make sure that that book would have a good chapter on fractions--it does--so that I have a good resource for the mathematics classes I teach. Fractions are not insuperably hard if they are well taught, but they are rarely well taught at any level of mathematics classes in the United States. If you'd like more background on this topic, see Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States by Liping Ma

http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

https://webstorage.worcester.edu/sites/rbisk/web/marlboro%20...

for a comparison of elementary mathematics lessons in two different countries, with China generally having much more mathematically accurate and much more thorough lessons in fractions and fraction arithmetic, among other topics.
Hey Entrepreneur : 5 Signs You Are Deep Inside the Startup Echochamber
NSA hooks in the dev forums? ;-) Crap, I'm not getting hell-banned am I?

Anyway, yeah. It's gone down a couple times for scheduled maintenance and we've been notified. This one wasn't mentioned at all. No surfin' the forums today/yesterday. boo.
When I worked for Citrix Online I took part in internal usability studies. It was great to be able to sit with a project manager and explain what made sense to me as a user and what didn't. It was also thrilling to see a suggestion I made make it into the final product a year after I left the company!
Only open if you think you can take it
This can be a little hard to stomach but very meaningful. Please proceed with care.
Gmail releases a new categorized inbox
Do Americans realize servers hosted in Europe will have more latency for you in North America? FastMail then becomes NotSoFastMail. I guess you all are okay with this trade off, in fear that the NSA is reading your super secret chain letter emails from your grandma.
Did you catch the top comment on the amazon page? It's pretty neat.

"July 7, 2013
By Karen
This book is so well written that I suspect that some years down the road we will hear the author's name is a pseudonym of some famous writer. "
Okay. So this style of advertising is known as "native/integrated advertising". As someone who runs a startup doing the same, I have few things:

1. Google has been doing this for years. It was known as "adwords". It's multi-billion dollars tool that gave birth to SEM.

2. It is limited to promotions tab. Promotions tab is where users go to check their promotional emails. I doubt Gmail will move them to real inbox. In fact, they will be foolish to do so. It's pretty smart move.

3. It is clearly marked as an ad with yellow background. So user is clearly informed about advertisement.

It's understandable that users are freaking out a little. But c'mon gmail has been doing ads in their inbox for a while. Email is extremely personal medium and they will be foolish to move ads from promotions tab to inbox tab. Google has lot of smart folks on their teams so we can trust them for the same.
And just to avoid misunderstandings: I don't think that 60 hour schedules are good! Personally, I prefer a 25 hour week of coding only on my own stuff and 0 hours of coding for other people :-)
Indeed, that is impossible ^_^ It was an aside for whomever did so. Intuition is not a particularly valuable or precise word, is it.
I'm pretty sure a book with the tagline "the new book by JK Rowling" wouldn't have needed much PR.
Because they get to roll out ads. The platform is only as useful to them as the size of their user base.
And, to be successful, billboard advertising necessarily must distract you.
I wouldn't consider flying with USAirways.
But there’s a catch: Until the news leaked about the author’s real identity,
this critically acclaimed book had sold somewhere between 500 and 1,500 copies,
depending on which report you read.

This is where they lost me in Rowling's case (not that I disagree with the overall point of the article).

Let's say, I decide to write a book and a publisher buys it. It sells 1K copies. What are the chances this book will be reviewed by influential critics? Intuitively, I'd say close to zero. Doesn't this suggest she was throwing some weight behind the publication, albeit maybe anonymously and through her publisher or agent?
Pigz looks nice. First I've ever heard of it.

I just use BackInTime though, like TimeMachine I guess. It's really, really useful.

http://backintime.le-web.org/screenshots/
Event Store 2.0 Released
Gmail new compose now has a full-screen option
I want to see a gmail type application I can run from my own servers, I don't have much faith in the cloud these days.
Well, in a sense, the previous rating is an heuristic. Downloading and listening a song is "boring" unless the song is good

So it's more or less this: "rate this song" is different from "do you like this song that other people thought it was good as well?"

Maybe for HN you can randomize the order on the front page and hide the score
Certainly not the most counterproductive - the ballot box takes that cake.
This is going to sound assholish

but that sounds like an excuse. If you can write a blogging platform, you can figure out a payment method.