skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bill Gates mission was to put a computer on every desk and in every home. He crushed this goal and is now doing truly amazing things through his philanthropic efforts. Compared to what he is doing now, running Microsoft is just not that important.
> The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming.

Funny, I thought the exact opposite; I agreed on the general point, but found the arguments against iPad bit weak. First of all they were factually incorrect. As others have demonstrated there are plenty of apps that allow programming the iPad in a way that is at least comparable to TIBASIC. You don't need developer accounts or review processes to use those apps.

More importantly the author missed the part that iPad is essentially just a platform, a tabula rasa if I may say so. As it does not provide any educational features on its own (afaik) some apps need to be provided by the school. And those apps provide the discoverability aspect that is missing from a vanilla iPad. It is reasonable to think that school would provide/require an app (or a collection of apps) that would be an equal or surpass the features of a graphing calc, including the programming features.

Of course I'm not really sure what educational apps are currently available, if they are adequate. But if not, then that would actually be something that HNers could do something about.
Not that I'm defending PG's suitability to the role, but, given Microsoft's size, if you require prior experience at running organizations this big, your candidate pool is awfully small. It's best to hire someone who knows the tech and the market, and assume that the organization stands for itself (i.e. does not require a major overhaul)
Pretty much the only thing you could offer him would be the chance to save his baby. He started the company, he built it up, and now he could (in theory) save it. It's a legacy thing.

Bill Gates's legacy is pretty secure, and obviously he's not hurting for cash. And it seems as if he's in a more humanitarian mission at this stage in his life. But if there were anything that could lure him back, my guess is that it would be the goal of keeping Microsoft relevant -- making it into a 100+ year company.
I'm curious why you wouldn't recommend it. I've never used it myself, but I've been reading about it the past few weeks. The design seems really well done compared to init.d scripts in the sense that every init script must reimplement daemonization, pid files, etc. (which is helped by examples, start-stop-daemon, etc. but is still a huge and delicate chore in my experience).

Is your objection that daemontools is largely unused / unmaintained and lacks features (such as flapping-avoidance)? Or something else?

Just curious, thanks.
Well the Camera for one, and the reviews I read just kept coming up with an analysis like...The Nexus is a great 'Android starter' phone...but if you can plump for the S4, do it.

The only reason I didn't want to get an S4 was because of the form factor.

Once the mini came out, at only $50 - $100 more, it was a no-brainer.

Now, though, I would make a different purchasing decision.

Although, experience tells me that with the price recently dropped, that probably means they are trying to empty shelves and clear our their backlog to make way for a new unit coming in the next few months.

Soo......I am not sure what I would do - to be honest.

Overall, am happy with my S4 Mini :)
It's the same drive and passion (or bat shit craziness) that leads people to doing these kinds of things that eventually make them so successful...so congrats for leaving the comfortable & making the leap into the unknown... but get ready for the biggest challenge of your life.
If you need to explain this too less geeky friends then
telling them that this amount of storage is less than a single letter on a modern display. Which on a 32bit display at 12x12 you would be on 576 bytes (8 bits) and this is compared to a 320 11 bit word (320x11/8=440) 440 bytes.

This makes chess on a 1k zx81 including display seem like bloat-ware now :).

Nowadays we have more storage on the keyboard controller chips, heck the older ones during the 90's had 4 KB storage, so almost 10x more ROM alone to work with - for a keyboard.
I haven't worked with any post-quantum stuff, but a quick search on Google Scholar brough up [0], which has a nice table of contents, and the explanations are understandable with only a background of general math (but they are mathy explanations). You might also want to checkout the wikipedia entries, which have more englishy explanations [1]

[0]https://www-old.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/lehre/WS09_10...

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
I don't know what he's doing now. But when I talked to him shortly after the acquisition, he was not working on anything related to Haskell.
IMO, this is a beautiful article.

The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to see convention and subversion as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the two."

I personally learned to program nearly 20 years ago, when I was 13. I was fortunate enough to have a computer around the house and was pretty familiar with MS-DOS and the various conventional memory incantations required to run Games, and I'd played around with GW-BASIC but my family was visiting some relatives' house where I found and picked up what I consider to be one of the most formative books of my life: C for Dummies. For some time, we'd had a copy of Borland C lying around the house, and a copy of K&R, but I could not get into it, though I'd made a few stalled attempts. But this book... it brought the computer alive for me.

Fast forward to today, I am technically self employed, though most of my work is a full-time contract with a single company, and I make a low six figure income. All because I learned to play and experiment with that beautiful thing called programming, because of C for Dummies. Dan Gookin (the author) changed my life, in much the same way that the article's author was changed by the discovery of the programming tools for the graphing calculator.

I am a high school dropout, and very nearly failed out of two universities before completing my bachelor's in Comp Sci after 8 years of attempts. I have historically had a tough time of conventional learning, though I believe I've matured enough for this to have changed over the last few years. Programming taught me discovery, experimentation, a whole, whole lot of getting shit wrong, how to figure out solutions to poorly defined problems (which usually first requires coming up with a proper definition of the problem), and so much more.

Programming is a beautiful thing. My friends just had a baby girl and at their baby shower they had a little 'time capsule' where people could leave notes for the baby to read in the coming years. Mine said that I would be happy to teach her how to program.

For me, programming is a big part of life!

Finally, I love the fact that a non-professional programmer embraces and sees the value in this.
Tomorrow's Ember 1.0 Release: Things to Know
A state engaging in an official process of finding the facts is called litigation. What should be sufficient showing to trigger this litigation against a prosecutor? In this case, it was a journalist writing an article. So you're basically saying prosecutors should be subject to litigation based on articles by journalist.
Well, did you call your Congresscritter's office? I did, and was told they were getting a lot of calls.

Everything I can see in my corner of Red State America says enough people believe the government has stepped over a line such that we can very possibly win. Then add discrete lobbying by tech companies ... which will I expect play out a lot slower and limited than normal given the Joseph Nacchio object lesson.
Disabled student in his class. Can confirm we are exempt.
Anyone know the content of the deleted comment?
NSA Instructions on “Configuring Windows To Go as a Mobile Desktop Solution”
My takeaway from the article is I need to research more about mitochondrial health, which has long been suspected to be a key attribute of great athletes.
Compared to the current marketplaces, I would say one that's more general purpose (odesk, elance,...) that DOESN'T encourage a raise to the bottom.

Granted, this could be a more meta problem that might not be able to be solved technologically, but it'd be great if something that allowed both sides to pay for and receive quality work would be great. Perhaps some sort of incentives? I'll admit I haven't thought too much about it.
Mainly voicing my experiences with some of the different tools available.

I mainly find clients my own way because of things like this.

That being through the usual suspects, word of mouth, various forums, etc.

Other marketplaces tend to be too niche specific to be useful.

Maybe something that vets clients a bit more? Many of the other problems (payments, project management,...) have, in my opinion, been fairly solved. Or at least there's enough competing solutions in those spaces that you have options.
I find that hard to believe. Weren't there a few oil sheiks with more money?
Somewhat. A fully developed proposal will have a book with all that stuff, but OTOH it's a fact of life in Hollywood that you shouldn't spend too much money on that stuff before you go into production, for 2 reasons. One, it's a fast way to go broke. Two, you wouldn't have all that stuff to hand if you were trying to turn your friend onto a great film that you had seen and thought your friend should watch right now. Studio execs don't want to be distracted by eye candy or character sheets, they want to hear something that fires their imagination.
i even thought you were playing up your accent for added comedic value.

Hehe, I wasn't playing it up since I don't have to! :)
> IANAL, could you explain how one can distinguish between optional guidelines, and requirements that absolutely have to be met?

(I am also not a lawyer.) Certainly. Violating a requirement might result in your app being expelled from the Play Store. Violating a guideline might result in a warning or a a strongly worded message to clean it up.

> You must make it easy for users to understand what ads will be shown in your app, where they will be shown, and what the associated behaviors are, if any.

Yes, but this doesn't require an opt-in dialog as the title suggests. The opt-in reference is a guideline.

> Further, you should ask for user consent and provide options for managing ads or opt-out.

There's that word "should", as in "people should avoid walking on the grass."

> So the first one is a hard requirement ("you must"), but it doesn't really explain what's acceptable to meet it.

You've raised an interesting point, one that lawyers are at pains to express if they can. A requirement that's ambiguous loses its authority. A requirement must be unambiguous in its meaning.

> The whole section is really unclear to me.

Yes, in which case it can't really be described as a requirement. These are suggestions, guidelines, not strict rules.
The word xenophobic isn't name calling when it accurately labels an emotional response, namely the fear of strangers. America is xenophobic with respect to Muslims, for example, especially so since Islamist terrorist actions instilled that fear.

In this case, I would say yes PG is xenophobic when it comes to people with strong foreign accents, because he's afraid based on his experience that they'll lower the value of the companies he's investing in.
Shopping with bitcoins can save you quite a bit of money.
It seemed like an odd choice to me at first, but they probably chose calcium carbonate because of its ability to polarize light:

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/polarization.htm...
(2) General purpose computers are nowadays really great for this, if the proper programming environments get set up on them. They have awesome screens for displaying neat graphics. They have reasonable keyboards for quickly typing in code and numbers and symbols. They have amazing CPUs and GPUs which can crunch numbers like nobody’s business.

This has never really not been the case. The merits of calculator programming have always been despite (or arguably, because) of their technical inferiority.
Interesting. Also, great to have the screenshots up front.
I just came here to mention it wasn't working for me either. Same problem, probably.
I'm accustomed to popular blog blowhards repeating the "you can't write code on an iPad" mantra, but I expect better here. We all know you can write code on an iPad, right? Off the top of my head, I can think of free/cheap apps in the app store for JavaScript, Python, Scheme, Perl.

Or Lua... my kids have my hand-me-down iPads. Each has Codea installed. Codea is a gorgeous Lua development environment with a great on-device editor and great libraries for sprites, sound, touch, accelerometer, and physics.

For some things, the Codea editor is better than what I use at work. For instance, if a function takes a color value as an argument, when the cursor is in that character position, a color picker pops up. Likewise, when using the sprite command, instead of typing in a name you can open a popover that displays a list of sprites on the device. It pulls assets from your photo library or links to your dropbox, so you can easily get assets in and out of the device.

My daughter decided to make a program to implement the sorting hat from Harry Potter. She googled for images of the sorting hat and other harry potter things, saved them to the device, and spent an hour obsessively re-writing her draw function so that things appeared where she wanted them to. She was stumped by randomness, so I helped her look in the built-in reference for math.random() and, with another assist on how to write an if-else block, she figured out how to use it. Keyboard input was rougher (Codea lacks the common UI widgets) but she got something working to her satisfaction.

So, after a few hours of playing around, she had a fun little sorting hat toy. She understands variables, incrementing variables every frame to create animation, what the word "random" really means (as opposed to her previous definition for the word, from some Disney channel show), and how to do some basic if-else flow control. Now when people ask her about her iPad, she says she knows Lua and shows them her sorting hat.

Codea can export directly to an Xcode project, so next weekend we're going to turn her sorting hat game into an app and install it on her iPad. I think that's when she'll be fully converted into a mobile app developing geek.

So, the article... there's a fun walk down memory lane (I, too, goofed off in school writing games for a programmable calculator) but it's unfortunate that he framed it with a TI-verus-iPad. Plus, his conclusion is just plain wrong.
Thanks buddy! Will give them a try.
Using a game engine to draw a 3D graph crossplatform
Right. Also, what happens when he sprints, or can he only run at a single speed?
Yes, I'm a big fan of Jurek. He is featured very prominently in the book "Born To Run".
I actually might pay to watch Miley Cirus do this.
The deleted comment above was along the lines of...

> [paraphrased] Anyone else having a problem with the link automatically being closed nearly instantaneously in a new tab? Clicking the link to open it in the same tab works fine.

This is weird, I'm having a similar problem on Chrome/OSX. Dragging the link to an empty spot next to other tabs works fine. I think that is a UI equivalent of copying the link and pasting it into a blank tab.

I suspect it's some JS on the page that examines the referrer.

Edit: AdBlockPlus was instantly closing the tab, presumably because the URL contained "ads.html"
I agree, the UI needs improvement. No one feels the gaps more than I do. But they say, "launch before you're ready!" ;)

For one thing, scrolling on its own (with mouse scroll), doesn't automatically highlight whichever card is now centered. So it breaks the flow. Clicking, or scrolling with keyboard are the only way right now to keep the context clear.

> the hyperbole is a bit of a turnoff for me.

I know, it's a big claim, and I don't expect anyone else to believe it. I thought about not including it, but it's honestly what I believe. Delusional founder? Check.

> This is really a different formatter for the same structure of text we've already been using

That's true, more or less. Table of contents, chapter & subsection breaks, etc, are all attempts to make the structure clearer.

However, once we go beyond 3 levels deep, this has significant advantages.

One can get an overview of a text by reading column 1, but can drill deeper and deeper into specific sections, and even into other trees that are embedded (or "transcluded") into this one. We could have all of physics, or comp-sci, in one tree, and the reader will always be able to drill in for more, or zoom out for overview.

> Why do we need something new? What's being added? What couldn't I do before that's now possible?

There are great benefits for writing this way, for one. Rearranging entire sections or subsections is just a drag and drop. Working collaboratively is also easier, because each person can focus on their particular strengths

> Hopefully this criticism is helpful.

It is, thank you. All criticism forces us to reevaluate our approach, again and again.
> Bill Gates would have foreseen the iPhone as a really big threat from day one and we would now be marveling at one of his famous internal angry emails that changed Microsoft's direction

Just like he foresaw the Internet as a big threat, right?
The Not-So-Secret Recipe to Disrupt TV
I'm the American-born son of Indian parents, so I don't have any hint of an accent (although I did when I was very young). Three years ago, I tried to start a company in India, and my "American-accent" Hindi was indeed a hindrance to my communication and, by effect, our success.
That's where the disappointment stems from; the first gen devices were so nice and promising, but the tech didn't "go anywhere" from that.
Reminds me a bit of Diane Van Deren, who became an ultra-runner after having brain surgery that disrupted her ability to judge the passing of time: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/apr/05/in-r...
That's a good comment, however, I have to disagree. Those management problems are software problems. And I'm sure PG, as well as the other software talents at MS would relish the opportunity to systematize it in software.
I am Indian, but a native English speaker. When I went to Northern Ireland, I took a long cab drive to meet a customer. For the first 15 minutes of that drive, the driver and I were trying to calibrate accents. I certainly couldn't understand a word he said. After a while, things magically started making sense.
It's funny how anecdotes in a comment section that support an article's premise are always upvoted/supported, but any anecdote that runs counter to it is always met with a hostile reaction.
Poor guy. I wonder how many light bulbs he had to screw in before people learned his name.
> Do you mean American mumbling accent or International English accent?

> Indian English has as many rights to life as have German English or Texan English or Aussie

You are missing the point. It's not about "rights to life". No language (or dialect, or idiolect, or accent) has a "right to exist", or they all do. Who cares? (Also, German English? wtf?)

What matters are things like: Are you getting the results you want? Are you delivering good value to others (so that they want to give you good value back!)?

If your job doesn't require communication, speak whatever you like. If you're so damn good at your job that everyone else has to obey your whims, AND you don't care about the total effectiveness of your team, then speak whatever you like. But most people need to communicate, and for some people, poor accent becomes a dominant factor in their job performance. The responsibility is shared, but it falls most-heavily on the person who is most-different, because it's easier for one person to change than for a whole office to change. This, I hope and trust, is what znt meant when he said "professional responsibility".

Sometimes it cuts the other way, though. I'll give you an example from my own life. I am personally bad at understanding thick south-asian accents. I used to think all people from my background (Canadian anglophone) had the same problem. But I'm learning that I have more trouble than most people. That means it's mostly my problem. But if everyone agrees that so-and-so is very hard to understand, then it would be mostly so-and-so's problem.

This isn't about "rights" or "entitlement". It's about being effective. It's not the "law of the jungle", it's the law of gravity. And it's laughable, stupid, and somewhat offensive, to say that we might as well go back to slavery.

(Of course, sometimes I hear someone say "you have no right to speak your own language in my country". Those people are stupid and wrong. Fortunately, most people who say things like that are also not very good at other things in life, and they usually get punished by the marketplace, and we can ignore them. The rare people who are both powerful, and also stupid xenophobes, everyone else should cooperate to punish such people.)
It's mostly about the lack of features. No support for cgroups, user switching, adjustable backoff, syslog, etc. Sure - it works, but it's the same thing as with qmail - it's the very minimum that you can call a useful SMTP deaemon. The moment you want any feature on top, you have to implement it yourself.

Either one of upstart, systemd, supervisord will give you equivalent solution that has more practical features. Daemontools was good enough a couple of years ago. (I used it then happily)

In short - there's nothing wrong with it really, but many alternatives are much better.
You'll enjoy learning some articulatory phonetics and finding out about the great variety worldwide in /l/ and /r/ sounds. I particularly like the final sound in the word "Tamil" as spoken by speakers of that language.
I have family in a similar village, these are exciting news, because we have been ignored by operators during years.
So, in your opinion, do you think opt-in wouldn't be necessary if the app just shows "vanilla" banner and interstitial ads? Is it sufficient to disclose the use of ads in the app description in the Google Play store, and mention them in the privacy policy?

Why mention this opt-in dialog at all if it's optional? I can't think of an instance where a developer would choose to implement this voluntarily.
What you describe as a "scar" is the same effect the top comment refers to. Romanian, much like my native language (Portuguese) is a peripheral language. Those don't evolve as much and so have not simplified as much as languages from central countries (think central Europe for comparison). The end result is that they are more complex and, to our advantage, use many more phonemes, easing native speakers learning of foreign languages.

To this day, I'm still baffled that Spanish does not distinguish between 'v' and 'b'.
There are a lot of people out there who make a ton of money and still stuggle financially. For some people, income is like RAM or CPU power: whatever you upgrade to, you'll fill it all up soon.

I also play little games in the store with trying to find deals and such, even though I don't need to. It's far better than the other way around. Certainly there's a middle ground, but it seems to be really hard to hit.