skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If at first you don't succeed, you're about average" comes to mind.

I personally think Windows 8 is the core of all issues. Many hate the OS, justly or not, and that causes any device with Windows 8 on it to sell a lot less units. They're actually lucky selling as many Windows 8 licenses as they have, even I got two and use neither (they forced it down my throat while buying new hardware, even though the OEM license states that there must be a license return policy, which HP just violates).

The ads for the Surface are pretty neat I think, and others I heard about it thought the same, but meanwhile nobody is buying. Apple somehow got people to use iPad as synonym for the word tablet. Microsoft really has to show an advantage over the iPad or a laptop, but so far nobody has seen any.
Integration tests vs. Bogus
The reality is most businesses and 85-90% (? I don't know the latest stats off the top of my head) of computers are still running Windows.
Surface revenue just in:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/30/microsoft_surface_sa...

But you're still right... they get 1,000 bad decisions before they dent their cushion of money.

Facebook, though, I'm less sure. Cringely has been calling it "the new AOL" for years, since its product seems to be a limited subset of what "Internet" provides.

But then again, he's predicted that long enough to look suspicious. A bit like one of my favorite bits from Lenny Bruce - "I know marijuana will be legal someday because all of the lawyers I know smoke it." He may be right, but all those lawyers are probably retired.

Cringely put peak-Facebook at 2014, can't wait to find out if he's right.
Microsoft should be Microsoft and stop trying to be Apple.

Microsoft isn't cool, and that's okay. Microsoft is the boring boyfriend you know is always there and will always load Office documents easily (see 'rayiner below). It's not sexy but it doesn't have to be.
He's trying to say that Google paid something tangible for something intangible. It's difficult to estimate the present value of a patent portfolio, ergo it's "intangible".
does SlidePay give you a slider?
You can slide cards with Stripe, you just need a card slider that you can use on the phone and implement the stripe API with it.

Edit: OK, it appears they give you a slider.
Microsoft Asks Google to Take Down Microsoft.com
> Your main thesis is that software and computing should be optimized to ship products to consumers.

Those were just examples of other things I thought were more important, it wasn't an exhaustive list. However, it's interesting that you focus in on "optimizing to ship products to consumers", when I made mention of no such thing. I mentioned development velocity and end-product reliability. These are things that are important to the process of software development regardless of the scale of the project or the team working on it or the financial implications of the project.

They are tools. Tools for making things. They enable both faceless corporations who want to make filthy lucre by shipping boring line-of-business apps and individuals who want to "expand human potential" or "instill a sense of wonderment and discovery".

Reliability and robustness are very fundamental aspects to all software, no matter how it's built. And tools such as automated builds combined with unit and integration tests have proven to be immensely powerful in facilitating the creation of reliable software.

If your point is that non-commercial software need not take advantage of testing or productivity tools because producing a finished product that runs reliably is unimportant if you are merely trying to "expand human potential" or what-have-you then I reject that premise entirely.

If you refuse to acknowledge that the tools of the trade in the corporate world represent a fundamentally important contribution to the act of programming then you are guilty of the same willful blindness that Bret Victor derides so heartily in his talk.
I was mostly talking about FPGA's. I don't know the criteria designers use when making decisions about what to add (or not) to a CPU design.
Did you see the commercial? It actually is easy to blame marketing.

Products don't become bad just because they're advertised poorly.

The surface commercial was easily the worst commercial I've seen in my life

Either you watch a staggeringly small amount of television or this is hyperbole.
Let's face it, this is the MS way. Most of the time, anyway. Office products were inferior once. Same goes for search, xbox, touch devices. MS iterates, sometimes slowly, and plays the tortoise. It doesn't always work (zune, bing), but sometimes it does (word, excel, xbox). The only caveat is the competition this time is Apple and Google. That's tougher sledding than Sony, Nintendo, Corel, Lotus, Novell et al. Then again, they've done battle with IBM, Oracle, and a different version of Apple in the past and found wins. Never write MS off on v1.
They have priced the devices way too high. Microsoft has been mostly successful before when started with low end products to build market share, got market feedback, and iterated over the years to iron out the kinks, and then moved up the chain eventually.

Apple has been in the premium product game for their whole life and know how it work. Microsoft needs to stick with their strength and avoid their weakness.
But that 9.5 billion investment is yet to return a profit:

Motorola, acquired by Google in 2012, racked up a loss of $218 million before items, more than four times the $49 million it lost a year earlier.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/07/19/google-earnings-ad-ra...
Entrepreneurs Gather in Eden for Outside Conference
Automatic Summarization in Reddit
Could you substantiate any of the claims? I'm surprised to hear that Google is shying away from Android or that they don't want Android to be used on as many devices as possible.
They priced it competitively with the product they were fighting. But now its prices way less than iPad. iPad - $500 Surface RT - $350
But Microsoft is the devil's incarnate, didn't you know?! /s
It sucks because he was my mentor as I grew as an engineer. Everywhere I look I find examples of what he taught me. Some of my thinking was molded by him. I have little engineering sayings and rules of thumb I got from him. Another friend of mine is the same. When we get together we invariably go into examples of how last week or last month we did X and it reminded us of him. I guess in a small way that makes him live on in our minds through what we do professionally every day.
I find Surface RT to have lots of lag, especially when opening up apps. It doesn't feel as fast as an iPad. I think the GPU is adequate, especially since the RT screen is very low resolution compared to an iPad 3.
An idea is worth nothing. The execution of that idea is what is valuable.
Confessions of a failed indie developer
Do you have any data on the quality of the patents? I thought the Motorola ones were mostly standards-essential and were a "second tranche" after the cream of the crop was previously sold off. But I can't find a good reference that I believe...
Dunno the OPs original reasoning, but I found this comment flippant and unsubstantiated. I don't code Rust myself, but both it and Go seem extremely promising and both "specialize" relative to C/C++ without stepping on each other's toes. There is room for both systems languages. As things stand now if it doesn't last very long, it will because of some future mistake by its creators or community, not because it loses out to some fitter competitor. AFAICT the multicore future doesn't have room for C/C++, so its logical that one or more practical systems language that do consider a multicore future will take the place of C/C++. Go and Rust seem like the most likely candidates on the horizon at this point in time.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I think the root of it all comes from our base expectation that humans should be treated equally. We expect that as a base and small deviations from it, especially favorable ones. But anything else has to be tied to very rational reasoning about why the discrimmination is happening.

So we can say insurance for women vs men is generally OK because it is two large groups and the discrimmination is tied to real justifiable costs in the difference of insuring them. We can say students vs others is OK because everybody has the experience of and choice to be a student. Similarly with seniors - we will all get to be seniors one day, with luck :-) So you're not discrimminating between people - everyone will get to experience these benefits at some stage.

The geographical segmentation is difficult because (just like race), it's something beyond our control - we can't help where we live, and it will never change. Suffering a selective negative consequence for something that is beyond your control violates our basic sense of right and wrong about human equality.

The time honored way to segment a customer base is to offer tiers of product. Identify a few special features and sprinkle them into a "professional" version. Then sell that for a higher price. If Australians on average are more affluent, more of them will buy the higher priced version, and you will still be making (some of) your extra money. But the ones who are equally well off compared to those in other countries will not be disadvantaged.
I'd say that Microsoft didn't so much fail at the Zune as they realize that the PMP market wasn't a place where success could happen even after dropping billions per year. Zune became part of Xbox Live, Windows 8, and Windows Phone. Apple is the only major player in the PMP market for a reason, Android has barely even touched that space. Everyone I know who used a Zune loved the experience, although it was ridiculously easy to make fun of. The problem is, PMPs are a niche market, and upending the iPod will cost more than any profits there are to be had.
I don't get the analogy. SlidePay is the "Android" of payments versus Square as the "Apple" of payments, but the author then goes on to say SlidePay is like a white label version of Square. How is Android a white label version of iOS? How does the analogy help frame this service? Why not just explain what it is and how it's different directly?
> the CPU GPU combination does not matter because Surface was/is still plenty fast with the hardware it has.

It really isn't. Nearly every review mentioned that it felt a little slow. Anand Tech mentioned it was "almost" as smooth as an iPad, but felt slower starting apps. Tech Radar said its graphics performance was "sluggish." Ars mentioned apps starting slower than they would like. I had a Surface RT for several weeks, and that was exactly my impression: it felt just a step slower than my wife's iPad, and that wasn't an admirable quality in a $500+$100 tablet. If Surface RT had started at $350, people would have perceived it as an acceptable compromise.

> Although office was updated a month or two after the release and fixed the performance issues in time.

It doesn't matter what happens "a month or two" after all the reviews are written. Nobody who wasn't hoping for the Surface RT to succeed bothered to go back a couple of months later to check for updates.
iPad sales in a year were close to 7 million http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-ipad-estimat.... RT has sold close to 2 million in a year.
Samsung is merely being retro: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/04/30/10298...
AppDirect Launches API Platform To Connect Developers And App Resellers
> Modern IDEs are not text editors. They are heavily augmented with syntax highlighting, completion, code-folding, refactoring, squiggly red lines.

How do any of those features make something 'not a text editor'? I'm pretty sure vim is still a text editor, and my vim does all of those things, with the possible exception of refactoring (and I'm not sure I want a program doing my refactoring in the first place).
computers or PCs? Those would be very different numbers if we were talking about all consumer devices that compute.
The hard part about freelancing is that more often than not, paying clients want to see your portfolio. Now when you are starting off, most of the time you will have little to nothing to show(or atleast I did :P).

I started off by helping out student organizations in my university and building websites for them. I then used those websites in my portfolio. Within the universities, some organizations caught wind of my work and asked me to build their sites for them. Soon, I had people tell me that their family/friend wants a website and I found myself building those sites. Then I started branching off into the community. I posted on local boards and got a couple more clients there. After this point, I started getting word of mouth referrals.

In a gist, you start with customers who will pay you little to nothing. Do a good job and advertise that work, you will attract higher paying customers. Having a few personal projects will also help, just make sure that they look good (remember "To the user, the interface is the product".

Good luck!
Using Chrome and JSON for LibreOffice profiling
Every company I know of other than Microsoft who did that is either out of business or Sony. As far as I am aware, Nintendo has never taken a loss on hardware, or at least doesn't make a habit of it.
As far as I know "casual games" are games that are very easy and very rewarding, thus great for pretty much everyone that just wants to pass some time (a huge audience obviously). This article somehow manages to use "casual games" as separate category besides, say, "Cards & Casino". What's the difference? Almost all games I've tried from the Play Store are casual games, even all racing and almost all arcade games, and I gave up on mobile gaming because of that.
I'm waiting for the $200 CalDigit Station. No FireWire port but multiple USB3 and you can attach 2 monitors, 1 HDMI & 1 Mini DisplayPort.
Do you consider Planner and the actor model not to be historically important?
Looks like open signal has become part of Apple's PR arm. I will be uninstalling iOpenSignal...
Could it be that they are betting on ARM and x86 processors? Given the fast pace of technology development on ARM, if they keep sticking on to Intel, they might lag behind others in terms of what they can provide.
Need a Tooth Replaced? Urine Might Solve Your Problem
I'm not convinced ORMs ever have a place. Using SQL do do CRUD-type things just isn't that hard, and using the raw SQL is generally much clearer.

I think the Anorm developers say this best: "SQL is already the best DSL for accessing relational databases. We don’t need to invent something new." http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/ScalaAnorm
Have you published your hash function?
BTC can function perfectly well as a supplement to traditional currencies, but it cannot replace them. The needs for currency by the private economy is not fixed, tying an anchor around your political ability to respond to those changing needs is not wise. I can count the number of incidents of runaway inflation on one hand, whereas incidents of runaway deflation are much more common and persistent.
> iOS fragmentation is masked by using the same version number on devices that support different api's

Example of this? I can't think of one offhand (besides things like the original iPhone not providing fine-grained location, because it didn't have a GPS receiver). Some of the user-facing features vary by device, but the APIs are the same.
Don't forget the MS Kin: a half billion dollars in development, just 500 units sold.
Actually the truth was -- Yea Macs don't have malware because nobody targets OSX...Yet.
You now, in some sense those early visionaries were beaten by the disruptive innovators of their day.

I think the argument here is that 1000 little choices favoring incremental advantage in the short term add up to a sub-optimal long term, but I'm not so sure. I have a *NIX machine in my phone. Designers "threw it in there" as the easy path. And it works.
Suppose Microsoft was a pharmaceutical company. Would this be news?

Merck had nearly $7 billion in operating losses last year on $48 billion in revenue. Microsoft had $22 billion in net revenue on $78 billion in income. The write down affected profits by less than 5%.

Surface is a research project - like Kin before it. Microsoft put several million Windows RT devices in the field in less than nine months. They will probably put another several million in the field in the next few.

That's a lot of stinking data, a lot cheaper than clinical development of a new new drug, and almost certain to be repaid over the long term because they've got Windows running on ARM and while there's the normal calls for Ballmer - Microsoft's second largest stockholder after his college buddy Gates - to fire himself, there are not widespread reports of technical failure from the field. On top of all that, every device they sell recoups part of their sunk cost in R&D.

Microsoft built a reference device for a new operating system. They have collected data to help their hardware partners develop more devices. They have collected data upon which to build a roadmap for Windows on ARM. Microsoft does not live and die quarter to quarter with Wall Street because the founder and first Business Manager still hold enough stock to call the shots.

They also realized well over a billion dollars of wealth apiece last year from Microsoft's operations. Both the numbers and the standard journalistic refrain that Microsoft is failing are pretty much the same as last year and the year before etc. It's just another news cycle.
Issue 93 in marketbilling
The may have been forced to purchase Motorola in order to protect Android?

During its Q2 earnings conference call Motorola hinted that it is ready to join Android patent racket, and start demanding licensing fees for its IP from other Android manufacturers.

This week Motorola’s CEO Sanjay Jha reiterated this message, and made it even more clear – they do indeed have plans to start collecting IP royalties from other Android makers.

http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/11/motorolas-sanjay-jha-o...

To find out, I guess we'll have to wait a few decades for the book?
IPad is already in its N-th iteration. What was Microsoft thinking that it could pitch an alpha/beta product against Apple's mature product head-to-head?

Pricing it low initially gives value to the users and they would be more forgiving of its shortcomings. It at least creates market share and momentum.

Priced it high initially and then low it is the worse marketing approach. The initial high price kills market penetration, and the subsequent price slash creates a sense of desperation and signals something is wrong with the product.
> I cannot remember what the update cycle was like on Microsoft phones.

For Windows Mobile? In almost all cases, they never got upgrades at all. The iPhone was pretty unusual in its day as a non-computer consumer electronics device that got substantial software changes after release.
When players buy your game before it's done: Expert tips on alpha funding
I was speaking purely in relative terms. Compare the actions of Manning and Snowden.
Their take on it was that it's a great artists' device.

Well, visual artists at least. No existing audio software runs on it, and it doesn't even support playback of MIDI files. I remain somewhat interested in a Surface Pro, but (like Google, and like MS themselves on Windows for years) the Surface is only useful to musicians for checking email.
If the higher clock speeds are truly never used for anything but benchmarks then that's downright dishonest. But is that established to be the case? Perhaps those speeds are available for extremely heavy loads under specific circumstances (wired power, etc) that are rare but can actually occur. If they are, then this does seem like a fairly reasonable thing to do. Still mildly shady, but no more so than the norm when it comes to benchmark optimization.
Are you kidding? In an over-crowded market for computing devices, products sell bad precisely because of bad marketing. If you can't differentiate, you are as good as dead.
How exactly did they have time to let brute force work? You say that as if PlayStation/Nintendo were nobodies that MS could just casually let time sink in to turn a profit
Is Silicon Valley Insensitive to Homeless People?
It is satire, not farce.
Note to self: Make sure to use "com.antutu.ABenchMark" as the internal app name for my next android game.
I regret that I wasn't more prepared and don't know how to describe the situation. One isn't prepared with drones appearing from nowhere and watching your home, you know. Imagine you see a car approaching you fast, everyone seeing you would think "jump or run to the side, now", but when it happens to yourself in a moment you weren't ready, then you just freeze.

I haven't seen it first, but felt the vibration and after touching the window for about 10seconds I was sure that this wasn't my neighbours music or something else. It was weird because I didn't hear such deep sound before, it wasn't very loud, but had a very low frequency, I guess that's why the window vibrated so strong. One could feel the pressure or tingling on the skin.

Then it came into eyesight, I don't know if it switched that red triangle shaped thing on, or if I saw it after starting to look for something that could make such strong vibrations. Everybody would look for a car parking there with loud music, so did I. But I didn't see it, so I looked up.
The thing I focused my eyes on first was to see, if there is some movement below it, like rockets, lights or anything, I was really afraid of what would happen next. I couldn't run away, it was just there. After starting to realize the situation that I was in, I hid at the side of that small room, but could still see how it stood there in the air. After some time, it flew higher and increased it's speed, without the red triangle shaped thing in sight, it was hard to make out. The first thing I did, was to call mum and ask, if she's ok.

Summing it up: It had some kind of engine that allowed it to stand still in the air and move to different directions, it was gray or dark, not sure. The engine wasn't loud enough to get aware of it from a distance, but when "near" you could feel very strong vibrations. It could accelerate pretty fast. It had no flashing lights, but it looked like there was something moving below it, I couldn''t make out what it was. I don't remember the shape good enough, sorry. A prominent thing was the large triangle shaped red thing on the front of it. Could it be infrared? Isn't infrared invisible to the human eye and why was that so prominently visible then?
Yeah, but they sure spent a lot of money and have a lot of data on a "reference device" that nobody wants to buy.
Visual programming is used in a few widely used ETL tools and it's not that much fun if you know how to program. Max/MSP and Pd are fun, though.
In somewhat related news.

Google caught using misleading report to claim Nexus 7 outsold iPad in Japan

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/30/google-caught-usin...
The troubling thing is that this has become rather a pattern for MS. What's the last MS product to actually do ok in the market? Windows 7? Even that felt like a bit of an anomaly at the time.
Let's talk about office

MS was like "Whoa we are giving you the tablet with office 'cause you ever dreamed a tablet with office and you totally hate a tablet without office". Ballmer almost said something totally equal to it

Problem is, in the last year, market has showed that no one need a tablet with office and that office is not more a killer feature, mainly for the common users market (it has still sense in corporation market).

So they pushed and pushed on this feature when it was practically useless to convince anyone to buy an rt. This is another reason to blame failure ALSO on the marketing part of MS.