skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i don't really trust microsoft products because they have a track record for being consumer hostile (like how they thought the xbox one phoning home was acceptable etc).

I'm also one of thousands of people who has my digital content locked up by them due to their ridiculously complex digital rights management on the 360, that is far far more ornate and frustrating than anything rootkit-toting sony has ever thrust upon me.

They are paying people to develop apps for their platform. oodles and oodles of cash. it's literally a joke amongst mobile developers that they have come to almost expect a pay-day from microsoft to port things to their platform.

In my opinion, they have meticulously dug themselves into a hole of being generally untrustworthy, and it will take a miracle to extricate them from it.

But hey, i'm not really happy with apple anymore either, so I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
Yeah, I've had plenty of problems with that in the past. I'm currently using an older version of the kernel. Apparently, the problem has been fixed in 3.11 (currently in rc). I'll just wait until that becomes stable before upgrading.
Uhh, Poor Steve having to save the company because it was at the brink of extinction due to the evil government action of the US and the EU is about as revisionist as it comes.

Look, that company violated antitrust laws left and right and Steve Balmer was instrumental in this sordid affair.

I'm neither a Microsoft hater (I actually think their OS offerings since XP are pretty solid) but that's just so much revisionist bullshit I couldn't even finish the article.

Microsoft was not punished for being big and successful. They where punished (and rightfully so) for repeatedly and purposefully violating the law in a multitude of jusrisdictions.
"Here's the assumption: the probability of a visitor leaving the site at any given moment is constant."

Terrible assumption. It's probably something closer to this:

P(Leaves site without reading / sub 2 sec): 0.2
P(Leaves site after skimming / sub 10 sec): 0.6
P(Leaves site after reading 1 page / 5 minutes): 0.1
P(Leaves site after reading a bunch of pages / 30 mins): 0.1

If you're going to make decisions off of something like duration, then you should code up a basic bit of javascript/database that can store real values.
I don't think there will be consequences but that does not mean it isn't illegal. Technically this is the same kind of breach that is against article 22 of the Geneva Convention on Diplomatic Relations (a pretty long document). That everybody does it all the time and that it should be expected is one thing, that the host country does it makes it something a bit more serious imo.

After all if the most powerful country in the world uses the fact that UN has a residence inside its own borders (but legally speaking outside of them) to achieve home-court advantage then it might be time to relocate.

But that will likely not happen.
Poor Barkley.
System76 Servers
Wasn't Vista supposed to be that awesome new-technology operating system with WinFS and whatnot? I think the big failure was that it came out as a Windows XP with a new (worse?) interface and too many problems. Windows 8 is just a continuation of that road, still no new technology under the hood and an even worse interface for desktops (imo).
Has anybody gotten Require.js to work with a CDN (say Cloudfront) and on IE browsers (below IE9) ?

We had faced poor load time performance because of this.
the barking dog is so annoying
I'm not even sure this is "too smart" for your job, this feels a lot more like "too driven" or maybe more accurately a willingness to stay complacent. If you give any value to the personality tests that exist something like 60%+ of all Americans have a stable personality, one that is happy with what is happening now and doesn't want to rock the boat. This is normal, and to me what this article is really calling out is that if you're not one of those people, don't become one just because it's what you think is stable.
> Being responsible has nothing to do with not changing your mind.

Being responsible has everything to do with changing or not changing your mind. An anonymous troll can lie and say, "I never said that." A named person cannot -- he has to accept personal responsibility for his past statements and actions.
In this language, I don't think it makes sense. (Then again, I think little of this language makes sense. Neat hack, but still in the "if I want GC I'll use the JVM" bucket that a lot of these fall into.)

In something like Scala, you can end up with some fairly hairy eyesores of variable declarations and the type is often not that important when you and everyone else have the ability to hover over a variable name and see the computed type immediately. Wouldn't work for a vim-driven language, but works well in an IDE.
I am not aware of any statistics, but Amazon is a fairly well known alternative that's on every Kindle Fire as far as I am aware.
Currency seizures from Bitcoin exchanges
Also I think at that time the pc-market was not in a situation of crisis as in the recent years.
The problem, now, is not only that w8 bring a different ui and so a lot of people are just a bit frightened by it, it is also that the sells of general purpose pcs are worldwide down.
Funnily enough, I actually originally compiled that list long before Reader got shut down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666 I just added a few more recent things to it since then. So some of us at least were pointing out what was going on long before Reader.

As far as I remember the translate API was the first of the recent closures that really caused a storm.
The t-test is invalid because duration data is non-normal. You can actually see duration data as a histogram in GA if you want to test hypotheses on it's distribution.
Certainly not, but people that hold onto these kind of views are ... It's hard to deny the existence of this "culture" that has popped up that seems to dominate the conversations.
It does, though most people seem to suggest the same crouton stuff for it. I tried that for a weekend and think that advice is misguided.
Earlier thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6271259
Discoverability and serendipity.

I want my son to be able to pull down an atlas and noodle through it, or Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable, or {insert long list of books here}. That's harder for him to do if they're all stuck on a disc somewhere.
Which will be for the good of everyone. In 3 years time, people should have moved on from IE9.
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وملقا
Ehh show me the data and we'll talk. I'm pretty sure youtube did some serious usability testing before deploying the loading bars.
> You say that as if it's his fault.

I don't think he was. I read that as the unspecific "you", with the meaning being equivalent to "That's the price one pays for writing an app with a UI in python."
Yeah, but that team of solid systems/backend developers would exist whether these companies paid a horde of "reboot button mashers" a pittance or a (smaller) horde of solid application code programmers a lot more. So in the end, even if the backend code has to be solid the middle tier and frontend code can be pure crap, and the company saves money by spending just enough on the solid systems programmers and then practically nothing on what amounts to internal tier 1 support.
This looks good. However according to the web framework benchmark its performance looks pretty underwhelming, below that of Python and Ruby:

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7...

Has anyone used this in production?
I'm getting the feeling this is the thread to figure out who the old folks are.

Yep, EDI is cranky and a pain, but there is a lot of expertise out there and some of the software is not totally heinous (unless we are talking health information via EDI, then it all sucks and you might have to learn MUMPS / M). There are standards.
Essentially you are saying 'fuck you' to any other country but the US short of engaging in war. Do you realize that treaties exist with the express purpose of avoiding that?

The fact that the US can bully its way wherever it wants and can afford to ignore every treaty it is signatory to is setting a fine example. I'd hold a tinpot dictator to a higher standard than this. It is recognized that some parties are stronger than others. That does not give the stronger parties the right to ignore their treaties, which count as solemn promises rather than lip-service.

Dumb shit like this is what got us into plenty of wars in the past.

If the United States does not want to be party to treaties then it should simply not sign them. (See: the ICC).
"funny" fact: they also did not respect the punishment EU gave them, so they were punished again over it.

Microsoft has serious problems with let the competitors a chance to compete.

edit to add data: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4069126/eu-fines-microsoft-...
Okay, I had an issue with www.rhoscript.com and rhoscript.com causing XHR errors.
I'm actually a little disappointed that a mature compiler like javac doesn't seem features such as escape analysis and being able to compile Enum types to primitive values (compiling them to a single byte would be enough for most constants). I might be wrong about these specific cases, but my overall impressions is that compilers like the main one for Java aren't very adventourous when it comes to compiler optimizations. They sometimes seem pretty primitive, even. It's understandable if optimizations would add a lot of time to the compilization, but I don't see why it can't be added as compiler flags at the least, to be used for shipping software.

I have never hacked compilers myself, so I might be totally off the mark on all of this. And the specific things I've mentioned might be much harder than what they seem at a cursory glance. But this post is more of an inquiry into the matter than a definitive statement about the status quo.
Yeah, no.

My son has ADHD. While he loves learning, he's obviously disqualified by the section of the eligibility requirement that says, Children...who have behavioral issues that may hinder their work or the work of others, should not apply.

I want to find opportunities for him to pursue his interests. I'm not trying to raise a prodigy.
>You're still fundamentally arguing that because a safeguard can be circumvented, there should be no safeguard.

No. I'm still a bit undecided on whether a safeguard would be worth adding or not. What I'm arguing is that many of the people making points in favor of a safeguard are doing so on weak reasoning, where they overestimate the effectiveness of it against a casual, untrained attacker. No foreknowledge is needed to make a search, and if you find instructions then I very strongly disagree that running a program is harder than navigating settings.

> deleting the dumper site from the browser's history, (and DNS/proxy records if they're being logged) using a system password to install the software if the system has that kind of security

Oh come on. This is supposed to be a casual situation where you let someone use your computer. What kind of history-monitored remote-logging computer is going to have saved passwords and unauthorized access in the first place?

> keep an honest person honest

You already have to enter a page solely for editing passwords and hit specific show buttons per password. There is zero plausible deniability at this point. I think an 'honest' person will already be kept out, and any changes would only matter in marginal situations.
ANSWER TO YOUR GENERALISED QUESTION:

cXML http://cxml.org/ , OCI and EDI (mentioned above) are alive and well and commonly used for large corporates to deal with their suppliers without paper.

cXML (or even OCI) for the purchase order stage and EDI for the invoice stage is a typical setup.

ANSWER FOR YOUR SPECIFIC ISSUE:

The reason this doesn't and will never exist is that every business is different - you're essentially dealing with people like Joe Bloggs not standardised processes like HTTP. However, help is at hand:

https://www.receipt-bank.com/ - they take your email and paper invoices in any format, scan them, key in the data and inject it straight into your accounts system (or at least let you grab a spreadsheet).
I can't say I disagree or agree with the concept of these newer loading bars yet, but I'd really like to see citations or any references for just about everything in this article. Is this all just based on your assumptions of what confuses users? Or is this an area you've done research in?
> You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.

Less responses? Do you mean physically smaller responses, on little note-cards instead of letter stock? Or did you perhaps mean fewer responses?

http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l...
I wouldn't say "for longer". The original CR-48 had instructions for dual booting Ubuntu, and not Fedora or Arch (or any other distro)...
WebM is a standard.

WebM for Internet Explorer is a plugin. It needs to stay supported.
I don't get the controversy. There are very few reasons to have multiple user accounts on a home PC, but this sounds like one of them. If you want to lend your PC to someone or allow other friends/family members to access it at will, you need to create separate user accounts for those people. Problem solved.
Me too, I was pleasantly surprised that I could actually drive this version of windows with the keyboard. Which for me makes it the only version of Windows that I can bare. Energy use is better, and kernel hibernation feels good. Partitions as file system mounts finally. Better keyboard layout switching. And it feels faster.

I hate all the old Windows cruft that is still there, the split control panel between UIs (like user management), crappy add/remove programs, the fact that there don't seem to be many 64bit programs, not being able to find the network preferences easily - and that I can't get windows to play with my netgear router over DHCP (but that could be netgears fault). Huge updates that use up my allowance. And the horrible start screen etc.
If you took everything Google did and made each of them a separate startup, the vast majority would fail. Just because a new business venture is attached to an old one doesn't mean it's not a new business venture with similar risk of failure.
Not sure who said this first, but the classic quote is "If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room."

If you're the big fish in a small pond you're not only missing out on learning from others, and creating impressive things, but ingrained cynicism and having an over-inflated sense of worth are also risks.

Fortunately having an unchallenging job can provide lots of time and energy for research and side projects that can lead to jumping into more interesting work.
This. What kind of moron gets on a plane without earplugs or earphones?
Spy-hardware is nowhere nearly as prevalent as spyware (software), because you'd need hardware TCP/IP implementations and so on. I never heard of this happening to common people in real life. Unlike data privacy, which is almost too easy to disrespect.
Merg. There are contradictory assumptions here. For the approximation on the standard deviation you assume duration is a Poisson random variable. To use the t-test you assume duration is a normally distributed r.v. There are ways to unify the two assumptions, but they can't be used without direct access to the data. At that point, we could just calculate s.d.

I'd stick with assuming duration time is normally distributed. This leads to another class of adhociness:
http://www.statit.com/support/quality_practice_tips/estimati...
There are a bunch of uderlying scripts. These are great.

The rest of it - the UI, the workflow, the community - these are all horrible.
I came here to say this, and am glad someone else said it first.

That on top of the unwarranted distribution assumption is very dangerous. How dangerous? If the true distribution has heavier tails than assumed, then the true variance can be many times what is assumed. If the true variance is, say, 4x what is assumed then an average standard deviation variation will show up as passing a 95% confidence interval in a random direction. Getting to 99% confidence by accident becomes quite easy, with bad results.
Launching apps is jarring. I'd rather an on screen launcher. I wasn't the biggest fan of the start menu, but I hate flipping between the start screen and the desktop.
Or any sex at all. The early prototype female robots will say, "not unless you take me out to dinner first." The updated version will say "What? Sit around and talk, then mate? But I have important work to do! Shall I indulge your childish fantasies or work on curing cancer?"

Too bad people can't be updated like robots.
Great biography!
You are right.. Let me switch over to SELinux... but wait that was made by NSA themselves...

Playing around the paranoia, don't you think the NSA would have taken a minute to think, Gee we forced Microsoft and Apple to include backdoors in their OSes, maybe we should now tackle the OS that powers 90% of the web? You know maybe we could slip a backdoor in the one of the utility apps such as "htop".

Let's get serious, OpenSource is not always = Secure and Closed Source does not always = InSecure. Truecrypt is the perfect example: Open sourced but too complex to Audit, maintainers identities are unknown and offered binaries differ from manual compilation.

A good rule of thumb: Assume anything you din't write or can't audit as insecure.
Everything you said is correct. But it has nothing to do with the issue here.

The seller is not "limiting access". They are not taking away the work they produced. They are instead publishing defamatory messages on the client's domain against the client's will. They are essentially claiming the domain as their own, which is the real issue here. This wouldn't be an interesting or controversial story if nycfreshmarket.com was a white screen, or a coming soon type thing.
A (partial) end to slavery.
Significantly improved lives for women as far as being raped and domestic violence goes.
A significant number of people moving from the working class to the middle class
Democracy vs having a violent war frequently when there is a question of succession.
A significantly reduced fear of violent death, or violence in general really.
Unless you don't think slaves are people, I really think people are much better off nowadays compared to pre-writing.
> how wrong would it really be if diplomats from Canada planted a bug in the Whitehouse.

Not much worse than when they burned it down.

Anyway, Front street 151 in Toronto carries a substantial amount of US traffic. Maybe someone should check the place for taps.
print the page you need, scribble on that, stick it to the wall behind the monitor.
What's ridiculous is that we're fawning over something we've always been able to do, just because it's now done over the hundreds of useless layers of indirection that the web imposes.

"The computer revolution hasn't happened yet"...
Is it certain that these leaks actually came from Snowden? In light of the Independent's GCHQ story [1][2], it sounds like there may be State actors providing leaks in the name of Snowden that cast him in a negative light. Ideally, these news outlets would be able to confirm it's the real Snowden via GPG fingerprint or something.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-gove...
Yep I did read that before I posted the link. My intention is not to "win" an argument but to inform and hopefully be educated in return.
It was being hailed as the best software ever to land on our computers by some vocal microsofties on some forums at that time.

When it became clear that half the things promised (dbr filesystem, etc.) weren't delivered or were sub-par to promises Vista was then hailed as "foundation for the future... when you build a house you first dig foundations then put walls and a roof". Except when I buy a house, I want a house and not some hole in the ground.

IIRC there were four pillars: WinFS, Aero, Avalon and sthg else (audio or DX stack) ?
I think you're confusing different scenarios. Nobody was talking about lying. A responsible person will respond "I said that, but I changed my mind because X", and everyone should be happy. But in the problem angersock mentions, people complain, accusing hypocrisy as if everything you have ever said in your life was uttered mere moments ago.
The US is bound by treaty in this respect. That means that all arms of the US government including the NSA are bound in the same way. You don't get to pick and choose which parts of your government are or are not bound by certain treaties. Either they all are, or none are.

That's why treaties trump national law in the first place.
Balmers actual quote was a bit more nuanced than what the media reported, the actual quote is:

> I would say probably the thing I regret most is the, what shall I call it, the loopedy-loo that we did that was sort of Longhorn to Vista.

Which I interpret to be in reference to issues with Longhorn development rather than issues with the final product (Vista).

e.g. the failure of WinFS which Gates also mentioned in a Reddit AmA awhile back as something he wished had made it to market.
What this article misses is that despite the successes and failures of SteveB, to the outside world Microsoft is largely considered as a company without a vision. I don’t know if they ever had one, but all those talks all these years about tablets and handheld devices and those beautifully crafted videos about how computing will be 20 years from now, all that don’t materialize into products.

Take for example Surface (the table not the tablet). They go and produce a sci-fi table with a touch surface which looks amazing but costs an outrageous $10.000 and has no freaking applications. And that coming from a software company which has spend the better part of the last 30 years building APIs. Where’s the vision in that?

I use .NET daily as a platform for building web apps. I love it. I consider it a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the industry. But in the long term I don’t think that they have a clue as to where they’d like to take things. Right now MS seems like the company that waits others to innovate and then follow on their steps. They spend $7B yearly on R&D and you get to wonder what’s the end result.
> everyone doing business with these guys now knows they don't pay

No. I know that there is a payment dispute involving these guys. I also know that one party to that dispute acted in an unprofessional, possibly defamatory, manner.
Maybe it's because I never did Ruby then.

Beyond the title bait, since you have to know JS quirks anyway, and since CoffeeScript adds its own burden (like in the link), I really don't see the point of using it.

Also, the 'function' keyword is a very visible marker when I read code and this has became unconscious. I now believe that the quantity of code you write doesn't matter: readability matters most.
Weird, for me it's exactly the opposite. I remember the horrors of an 11 hour flight from LAX to AMS with a baby yelling away for the entire flight and not a chance to sleep.

I hear you loud and clear, though. It just didn't occur to me that this could be a problem for such a short period of the flight.
In the past the State Department, under Hillary Clinton, also tried to do things such as steal the DNA of UN leaders.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cabl...
Changing Bits: Lucene index in RAM with Azul's Zing JVM