skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see what Microsoft was going for with Surface Pro, and to some extent why the product was seemingly 'rushed'.

They (Microsoft) realize what Apple and Google has obviously also realized, that in the 'future' we will likely 'all' be using a tablet style device which functions very much the way it does now when we are 'mobile', but also doubles as a work station by connecting it to a desktop screen and mouse/keyboard.

And when the dedicated desktop/laptop machine finally fades away into obscurity, Microsoft must atleast have positioned itself as one of the major competitors amongst the devices which will replace it.

Currently Apple and Android tablets are marketed and vastly used as devices purely for consuming content, so Microsoft see an opportunity to market itself as the pro-tablet, the one you can get work done with.

And this what the Surface Pro is supposed to be, and it makes sense from a marketing point as it can leverage the one big advantage Microsoft has over Apple and Google, the huge amount of professional/production software which exists for the Windows platform.

However the big blunder I see with Surface Pro is the pricing, if priced similarly I'd say 9.9 out of 10 people today will choose something like a macbook air over a Surface Pro any day of the week, because people know laptops, they know what they are getting, they will not be betting on a Tablet on which to do their work when they can get the safe option (laptop) for the same'ish money.

So what Microsoft should have done in my opinion, is to sell Surface Pro at cost in order to sway the laptop customers, heck even at a loss, this is about positioning themselves for the post-dedicated-desktop/laptop world which by all accounts is approaching rapidly.

Instead they waste 900 million on Surface RT which is a product I can't understand at all.

That said, as someone who is no fan of Microsoft products and in particular their desktop monopoly I'm not that sad to see them stumble as they do, but I still find it quite baffling.
It might be nice if the picture of the couple at the beginning actually rotated/fade-in/out between "traditional" image of a couple, interracial, same-sex, etc.
Are you young? We tend to be much more idealistic when we're younger.

Why do you feel like there are only those two decisions?
I'd really hoped we'd have more support for IPv6 by now. It's funny, every so often there's a big "We need IPv6" push with lots of media coverage which is forgotten about shortly afterwards.

As far as I know there's only one ISP (Internode) here in Australia which offers IPv6.
he is not allowed to talk about his ipad / Apple stuff. did TBL ship the W3C? protocols are the perfect example of shipping by design.
Oh, blind spot on my part - I was so fixated on the RT context that I didn't read the article properly. Thanks for pointing that out.
DEA to pay $4.1 million to CA college student forgotten in room for 5 days
Windows RT has a full version of .NET 4.5, the only thing stopping it running your own pure "AnyCPU" binaries is the signature check.
Extensible Effects - An Alternative to Monad Transformers
So, you are not encountered the dependency and version hell yet and just assumed that maintaining all the libs and tools a rails app is implicitly requires is a easy task?) Good luck, then.)
All devices, except your laptop. Who actually wants to write more than a few sentences on anything but something with a keyboard?
In the big scheme of corporate misbehavior, posting fake user reviews barely even registers. Which is depressing, but still.
>fondleslabs

Ugh, I HATE this word. Why do people use it? To make themselves feel clever and superior?
I'm not sure about the technology or business, but I will say that I absolutely love the interactive sliding graphics on their landing page.
Yes but for now it's a case of money buys conspicuous consumption and the internet shouldn't work that way.

ipv6 will be a lot easier to adopt in 2015 vs 2013 so every year we can claw back makes life easier
Nice. Seems very similar to other document based collaboration services, perhaps most notably these folks:
http://www.collaborate.com/

Quip seems closed, no links to Google Drive or Box that I could see, and no way to share by PDF, but they include private links to hosted document storage. It's like the Asana walled garden[1] in that way, but Quip has a solid focus on documents not tasks.

Some strange UI artifacts on my iPhone 4s iOS7b4, text insertion didn't work; wonder if this is due to a proprietary attributed uitextview?

[1] http://asana.com/product
Much of that space can't be recovered though because it's just little non-contiguous bits here and there...
Any modern store would have an API that allows you to schedule a pickup through a mobile app and use Bitcoins as long as you schedule it 30 minutes to an hour before you arrive. What is this mentality Q2-2013?
Happens to me. Distraction is the first cure, I fall asleep all the time with the tv on. A good book or something else to take your mind off it will help.

The second is melatonin. Help yourself sleep. It'll replace that feeling of full and satiation you normally have. After a few days, you'll be used to it.
Awesome thanks! I hadn't read this yet :)
> I don't understand why people keep buying this company's god damn products. I mean, holy shit.

Hyperbole much?

Because they make very decent phones that can easily be made to run alternative Android operating systems that allow me to do whatever I like with my phone.

For example, you can't plug a USB Software Defined Radio (SDR) module into an iPhone to monitor and decode spectrum.
Looks awesome. I especially like the conversation column showing diffs and messages together -- it seems like an elegant way to collaborate.

Congratulations Bret and team!
Interesting though this sounds, I get irritated whenever I read about someone changing the existing paradigms of [insert topic here], and then continuing to use all the existing metaphors from the existing paradigms, e.g.; 'desktop', 'inbox', etc.

And despite my rant, I'm not sure if there's a solution to this. You need customers to understand how you're asking them to change, and without reference to the old terminology this is damn near impossible.
Five (or ten) years ago, NAT was "the solution" – which helped and worked for longer than the doomsayers predicted.

Today, I suspect SNI will be the important stop-gap measure. There's a whole bunch of websites out there on shared hosting with dedicated IP(v4) addresses for their vhost just so they can use SSL certs for https connections. If we can ignore Windows XP users and IE6 users, SNI allows SSL certs on shared IP addresses - if I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses.

(Having said that, analytics still shows a startlingly high number of WinXP and IE6 users out there. It'd be interesting to see if any of them ever "convert" in ways that'd require SSL certs? I understand why the use of pirated XP and 10 year old hardware are rampant across the 3rd world, for _my_ clients that demographic is almost certainly not likely to be ecommerce customers... That's a bit of a personally skewed perspective though, there's no good argument to be made that says wikileaks/twitter/gmail users on old hard/software shouldn't get ssl protection, but I suspect high-end bed linen online shops wouldn't be hurt at all by using SNI and thereby increasing friction for IE6/WinXP users…)
Security-wise is containerization safer than standard operating systems? (besides being relatively new and unexploited)
Haha, that's some great stuff. Gonna have to keep that in mind every time i see plans.
Nice. Seems very similar in focus to other document based collaboration services, perhaps most notably these folks: http://www.collaborate.com/

Quip seems closed, no links to Google Drive or Box that I could see, but they include private links to hosted document storage and PDF export. It's like the Asana[1] in that way, but Quip has a solid focus on documents not tasks.

Some strange UI artifacts on my iPhone 4s iOS7b4, text insertion didn't work; wonder if this is due to a proprietary attributed uitextview?

[1] http://asana.com/product
You are right, and then it comes android over it, more of the same for them all, now for the average user that makes the business profitable, this means nothing... (so I'm with you)

so still why?
advertizing .... average user would look to the numbers and buy it (as somehow people have started to realize are the same...)
> how do you prove that an IP address is accessible on the Internet?

If an address isn't announced in BGP, then for most practical purposes, it's not on The Internet.

But I'm sure that if someone acquired the authority to start reclaiming unannounced /8s, the entities holding them would figure out how to announce them quite quickly.
The messaging challenge Quip is going to have is that they have to call themselves a "modern word processor" so we have context to understand what it is.

But from the landing page this looks / feels drastically different from any word processing / document creation tool I've used in the past.

It might be interesting to test a variant that starts with a screenshot that centers visitors around what this has in common with today's word processor, and then hammers home the "awesome" part after that.
There are pictures of it being used in chrome. On a laptop. Am I missing something?
Yes you should.

Now ... what if you're not?
S-Voice. lol. It almost feels like they had a handwritten rules-based speech to text.
Best of luck - this is exactly what we're looking for. Suggestion: It would be fantastic if we could port existing merchant accounts or (better yet) existing gateways. For example, we're currently using Braintree for web transactions, but would love to use your service for mobile. It would be great if we could continue using our vaulted cards on braintree, but use your service for frontend.
Koding.com
Will your school allow an open ended leave of absence? I have been on such leave for eighteen years. It's good knowing I could come back.
That "something" can be almost any device. I'm writing this comment on a keyboard attached to an iPad.
Thanks for the advice. I think the depression would probably go away if I drop out (unless I can't find a programming job at all). I have contract work for the next year at least, so I'm not too worried.

If I go back, I'll definitely try out your suggestion of talking to counselor.
Anandtech nVidia Sheild Review (Tegra 4)
> Today, we are extremely excited to launch Quip. Quip is a modern word processor that enables you to create beautiful documents on any device — phones, tablets and the desktop. If you haven't already, download Quip to try it out.

Literally the first paragraph on the linked page.
I talked to several programmers, and they mostly said that a prestigious degree only helps out with the first few jobs (though they said that no degree at all is a slight to moderate negative). I'm not sure how accurate their perceptions are, and I think the tech industry might also be unique in caring less about prestigious credentials.

These programmers also said that a prestigious degree does help significantly in other areas, like finance and law.

What areas has your Stanford degree helped you in?
The analogy is fine. If you're a handset manufacturer (samsung, htc, et al) you can white label android (which works kinda like iOS). Just as you can't use iOS, you can't use square in your own app.
I'm in my late 20s.

I feel there are only 2 decisions because 1) I've felt the unparalleled creative power of controlled, maniacal dedication and 2) I may suffer from typical cognitive distortions despite reasonable achievement and lots of introspection
Its because the people who makes the decisions are too far removed from the people doing the actual work.

In an industrial/manufacturing setting, this might work because the people doing the work isn't doing anything creative (just labour). In a research and development setting, this cannot work because a decision needs to be made using information obtained from "the trenches", and management often are not in the trenches.

This is why small startups are always more agile and moves fast, can come up with products that suite their target better than a corp. I dont think this can change, unless the corp change their method of operation from a hierarchical one to a very flat, self-managed groups of small people, and trim the fat out. This has to start with "trust", and now-a-days, trust is hard to come by.
Thanks for the advice. I'm not sure if I want to try and conquer my depression right now, but I'm definitely thinking about the choice ahead.
Oh noes, I purposely avoided this variation because I didn't want readers to think functions don't have braces AT ALL. :)Thanks for your input!
A Java programmer unfamiliar with Haskell looks at a Haskell program and shouts, "I can't make even the slightest bit of sense out of this!"

A Haskell programmer unfamiliar with APL looks at an APL program and...
Apple finds D.C. is tough without friends
I'm replying to this part in a separate comment to avoid it distracting from the real discussion.

>Anything that is presently an untestable claim - ... - is not a scientific hypothesis.

Screw that. With the miniscule size of transistors in today's chips, it's untestable whether an i7 has an NSA backdoor. That doesn't make the theory unscientific. It's unscientific if I can't propose a buildable test at all, but it doesn't matter if the test can be built in 2013.

(If you don't like that example, replace it with something that involves reaching a Voyager probe. Completely impossible to do in 2013, completely possible to be scientific.)
Screen size is the biggest difference. Things don't, or at least don't have to, run full screen on a desktop. The UI is also not as big of a deal on a desktop. People don't buy Quicken simply because it is "prettier." Given the absurd number of different screen sizes, it's much more difficult to make an app that will look good on each of them.

The second part is the API differences. You don't get to use the latest fancy new features when 34% of your audience is on the older version. That is similar to windows land, but it is also not nearly as big a deal as the screen sizes.

Finally, hardware. Yes there is a lot of different hardware on desktops, but on average it is more powerful than on mobile devices. Ask anyone who has done embedded development, there are a different set of problems there than you have on the desktop. The same goes for mobile. Most of the new mobile devices have hardware on par with desktops from a few years ago, so it isn't quite as bad as embedded. That being said, the range of Android devices is huge, and there is some percentage running on crap that creates another headache for Android developers.
"I talked to several programmers, and they mostly said that a prestigious degree only helps out with the first few jobs"

Any degree helps out with the first few jobs. A prestigious degree is for life man. Would that I lived in a state with a top-tier CS school in a good location. I'm doing fine, don't get me wrong, but a Stanford or MIT or Carnegie Melon degree is worth so much more.
I'd rather just see the massive corporate reservations returned.

Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?
I just had a look at Scala jobs around Australia. $200k plus is the average salary.

Time to start learning Scala properly, it seems. :|
Well, it's pretty well known that using "beautiful" in your headline makes for a weak value prop, but it's also a hard concept to argue with. No one wants to make an ugly anything.
That's really interesting, and an approach to such problems that I'd never considered. I was excited that a "Code generator for bit permutations" (http://programming.sirrida.de/calcperm.php) exists, but using a theorem prover is really another level of possibility. Now I need to figure out how to apply it to the problem I'm currently thinking about: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17880178/how-do-i-sum-the...
Am I the only one getting "Resource not found" on the arstechnica site?
According to https://quip.com/about/ he seems like an underachiever on the Quip team.

>>Ryan's resume intimidates small children and household pets. After co-founding Google App Engine with Kevin, Jon, and Bret, Ryan boarded his hot air balloon and ascended to low earth orbit. He then won a Nobel peace prize, seven Olympic medals (all bronze), three Oscars, and the jackpot at Caesar's Palace. Since landing, he's cured cancer, penned the sequel to Ulysses, and achieved nirvana. That was on Tuesday.

They've evidently already raised $15 million as well. This should be really interesting.
and now look at what the xbone is going to turn into? PS4 is leading the mindshare, while microsoft attempted to use their "strong" position to leverage their device to becomes the center of the living room - which they find out is impossible because they don't actually have a compelling device.
The media diet
Is anyone else surprised that the creator of Litecoin needed to take a job? Given that the market cap of Litecoin is 53 million I would have expected the creator to have mined a good amount of that in the early days.

Of course he may have just wanted to take the job and not needed it but I would have assumed he would have worked on something for the Litecoin ecosystem.
Ask HN: What blogging platform do you use for your startup?
I am deciding between using Wordpress, Octopress or something else. Would love to have HN readers' thoughts on this.
It's funny that you mention testing. TDD/BDD/whatever IS declarative programming, except you're doing the declarative-to-imperative translation yourself.

TDD has always felt sort of wrong to me because it really felt like I was writing the same code twice. Progress, in this regard, would be the spec functioning as actual code.
Informs search engines not to index the http://www.quip.com/-/ directory.
The thing is that computing has both reached the limits of where "text dump" programming can go AND has found the text-dump programming is something like a "local maximum" among the different clear options available to programmers.

It seems like we need something different. But the underlying problem might be that our intuitions about "what's better" don't seem to work. Perhaps an even wider range of ideas needs to be considered and not simply the alternatives that seem intuitively appealing (but which have failed compared to the now-standard approach).
Apple isn't really consistently losing too much market share. They've actually been gaining share in the US and other developed countries. They are losing share to the really low end Android phones that developers are complaining about and are essentially worthless as far as a mobile app dev is concerned.

> But fragmentation is not a choice or the result of a strategic error by Google.

I think it is. The choices aren't 1 screen size or any screen size. There is a third perfectly reasonable alternative that windows phone took, and that is a handful of sizes that are likely to satisfy 99% of people.
I wrote these on PRISM and Google:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054532

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124
you may want to read this: http://www.prb.org/Articles/2006/ElderlyWhiteMenAfflictedbyH...
Yes. And unit tests are only for programmers too sloppy to get everything right the very first time, all the time.
There are various reasons that the legacy IPv4 assignments are not returned. At the normal rate of IPv4 address assignment, circa 2011 when IANA ran out, reclaiming all those addresses would have delayed address space exhaustion by maybe 2 years at most.

All it would have cost was unpredictable, unbound man-years of work as each organization tracked down each of their publicly addressable machines, not all of which were recorded, and vacated into smaller subnets of their address space. I'm sure you know of the servers that sometimes disappear behind walls during renovations. And some of the older machines require the kernel to be recompiled and rebooted to change their IP address. Ah, those were the days.

We just have to face the fact that IPv4 was not designed to be used on a network the size of the Internet. NAT and CIDR have stretched it out amazingly, but we've stretched it out about as far as it will go. We need to switch to IPv6.
I know for a fact that this girl [http://automateyourdate.com/testimonial/automate-your-date-t...] is on fiverr.com
Bad-Luck Numbers that Scare Off Customers
Since when? Action/adventure hasn't left the 2D realm at all.
Honestly, this wont change until we drop the skeuomorphing of paper...

Someday, someone will build something where "documents" may look like little blocks, with little indicators on them as to which data-streams they connect to live and how much social activity is happening about them - their popularity, their rated completeness, how many links to that info, security level, capabilities etc.

Take the whole idea of an entire stack and call it a "document" when you open it - it may contain whole DBs, connect to N other things and be able to produce X based on Y input from you or others. They may be intelligent enough to know to ask you to input a certain set of content before they can move onto the next phase of becoming complete, even with training information inside telling you how to enter into them the info they need to realize completeness.

Compressed abstraction and virtualization into a single finite functional datablock that can be moved sent secured monitored etc... just as much as any other stack/cluster....

/daydream...
34.1%, it's in the article.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree. The site is just a placeholder.
15% is still a lot. do you want to take a 15% pay cut?
You can just wait until its in the memory pool of some trusted nodes. Double spend risk on coffee isn't worth waiting for a block.
I think its because most 'bosses' don't want to do work. You need to farm it off to someone else and thus they need clearance. See the government outsourcing to Booz Hamilton, etc...
It is only a better phone if you print out the specs and compare them side by side.
If you go by that method than the iPhone can also never win. But in reality the S4 is a horrible phone (in my opinion of course). I've got one here for development along side the Nexus 4 and HTC One. Out of the branded phones the HTC One is definitely the best. It does the things most people want out of a device very well. The S4 is a mishmash of poorly designed applications and features. Full of gimmicks and awful design decisions.
yeah, and that's who you listen to all day? Really?
The New Reality: The Role of PaaS in Technology Innovation