skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no money in being an Android vendor except if you're Samsung and are totally vertically integrated.

There are a lot of people who would have picked up the attractive, well built, well engineered Nokia devices if they had the platform of Android.

The core problem with the "no money in Android" argument is that you can't choose not to compete with Android if you're in the smartphone game, which is pretty obvious given that we're talking about a company that went from hero to zero largely at the hands of Android (RIM being another example).

WP8 just isn't compelling compared to Android for a lot of users, which led to a lot of people moaning that they wish they could get one of those nice Nokia devices...but WP7/8.... Apple obviously is very much in a battle with Android, though they're in a much better position, and it's one that Microsoft isn't going to be able to emulate bringing hardware in house (especially given that it was already effectively in house. This new arrangement changes essentially nothing, but makes official what people long assumed).
I heard a rumor that Paul Graham is being courted, but it is probably disinformation.
Nevermind. Nokia itself was not purchased by microsoft. Only part of the company (Devices & Services buinesss) was purchased.
Yes, great post. I just went through this same discovery myself. Was worried the worker processes would need access, but thankfully they do not.
Hi guys, I'm the author. Here's a related blog post I did introducing the game:

http://quietlyamused.org/blog/2013/09/01/introducing-the-gre...

Feedback's much appreciated, and if you encounter any bugs, please report them via email to lars+glg@yencken.org

If there's a language you'd like to see that's missing, consider helping out by finding some good quality language samples or news podcasts in that language and emailing me.

Enjoy!
Microsoft to acquire Nokia pending board approval
I don't think you can call something a "turnaround strategy" when the result is to cause the company's value to nosedive so far that the most viable means to salvage any of their investors' money is to divest them of their stock at a significant loss. From the Nokia stockholder's perspective, even if by some miracle the company were to subsequently prosper under Microsoft, by that point they no longer own it, so how does that help them?
Microsoft could do a lot worse :-)
Why? Maybe it's not an important asset? Maybe you should pwn them?
British mobile phone group Vodafone sold to Verizon for $130bn
Speaking of handset makers that missed the revolution, I wonder who will pick up RIM as they circle the drain. Microsoft is probably the favorite right?
Time to stop showing up to the office and move into a houseboat.
You guys forget that old Nappy Bonaparte did quite well despite his strong accent. What do people these days make of that?
One can do surprisingly well by knowing the geographic region a language is spoken, and imagining the accent of people from there, then matching it to the accent of the person speaking.
I encountered a whole lot of lag. Some buttons took 5+ seconds to respond.
Jobs: Coming or Going?
At the time of your comment, it was already on the Wall Street Journal and on Rueters. Within the next 20 minutes it was on Forbes, BBC, New Zealand Herald, and Synfney Morning Herald. 10 minutes after that, it was on Seattle Times and ABC.
Which is kind of a meaningless distinction since the Mozilla Foundation wholly owns the Mozilla Corporation.
I remember this great debate in Brussels where it was decided against using english as the common political language in the European Union, and use this mess of translators, to avoid giving an unfair advantage to the UK/EIRE who would argue in their native language on political matters.
In the end it turned out probably right since the UK grew to hate Europe, they would probably have used any extra power to weaken it from inside.
At the very least he should have used a Xeon E3 to get ECC support, but even that wouldn't be directly comparable. The Xeon E5 and E7 processors have a ton more I/O bandwidth than the desktop platform. The new Mac Pro will actually be able to run 2 GPUs and several Thunderbolt ports without bandwidth starvation, but no system based around LGA1155 or LGA1150 can. Also, the server platform has quad-channel memory, compared to dual-channel on the desktop platform.

Workstation parts are expensive, yes, but they do offer capabilities that you can't get from consumer parts. If you don't need a workstation, then workstations may seem ridiculously overpriced, but if you do need a workstation, then ordinary desktops are crippled unreliable crap.
2013 is the debut year of Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, and Samsung's supposed flagship Tizen phone. Now, the question is if carriers, consumers and OEMs will respond to them with any enthusiasm, or treat them like third parties in American politics.
Even if you limit it to static HTML and CSS, there are still many people who do that as a job. The only thing that has really been automated away is when someone is willing to use bog standard templates.

And in that respect, that kind of optimization has been happening since the dawn of the personal computer. Lotus 1-2-3 was the defining application of the PC, allowing average users to do programming-like operations that were once only in reach of programmers.
Great move by Microsoft.

This is an acquisition that arguably puts Microsoft mobile capabilities above that of Google's, and closest to Apple's. They're getting industry veterans with great design talent. They're getting a Lumia product that has the best build quality of any non-Apple smart phone. They're acquiring proven channels to access global markets. Both Nokia and Microsoft have been floundering in the mobile space recently; neither have had any real explosive successes. Together they might make some really compelling offerings.

I'm not a fan of their mobile OS, but I am a huge fan of Nokia's latest smartphones, and if Nokia design's talent can figure out how to introduce a better UI, I'd seriously consider getting The Windows Phone as my next smartphone.
Google bought Motorola for 12.5 billion and then sold off it's Home division for 2.3 billion. At the time of the purchase, Motorola had 2 billion in cash so in the end, Google probably paid 8 billion ish for Motorola. Considering that in those 1.5 years, Moto and Nokia's values have been decreasing as well, I think they are pretty close in value.
Is there a specific post you wanted to highlight on communities-dominate.blogs.com?
Yup:

Upon the closing of the transaction, Nokia would be restricted from licensing the Nokia brand for use in connection with mobile device sales for 30 months and from using the Nokia brand on Nokia's own mobile devices until December 31, 2015.

MS bought their present design team and fab facilities, but what's left of Nokia can reenter the device business in 2016.
From Lindbloom’s site: “The mapping was done such that Munsell hue 2.5RP has a UP Lab hue angle of zero degrees. This particular rotation was chosen to allow greater chroma encoding of blue colors in the lower right quadrant of the a/b plane.”

Also, to be completely precise, it should be noted that the lightness dimension of UPLab was left the same as CIELAB’s lightness, rather than using Munsell value. Only a and b were adjusted to reflect Munsell hue/chroma.
1 living dead + 1 living dead = ...
Nokia was not acquired by MS, Nokia sold them their burning platform, their phone department.
Some reports are incorrectly stating that Microsoft is buying the patents, while Microsoft's own press release clearly states that they are only licensing them for a term of 10 years.

This is almost certainly to satisfy regulators who will have final say over whether this transaction will close.
Well it's not all of Nokia.
I found Microsoft's strategic rationale for this deal interesting: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/press/2013/Stra...
With the exception of the folks doing keyboards (which they have been serially been screwing up for the last ten years) Microsoft has some very good hardware people. The Surface was a nice piece of kit, but way expensive (for unavoidable reasons, I hear) and running the wrong software (also for unavoidable reasons).
I think to be fair, the real lesson of this whole thing is that people need to understand how they will be perceived. If you have an unfamiliar accent to your audience, you might have issues being understood and respected. And if you make public remarks about aspects of people they can't fully control--particularly when it comes to language--you should probably make sure you're not mixing your message with sarcasm. To do so really obscures whether you're trying to be helpful or trying to be perceived as clever, yourself.

I just hope we all learn something from this instead of just getting all defensive.
TBH, I don't think you're in the wrong here, but expecting someone who has already brought something to your attention to file a "bug report" against your personal website is a bit arrogant.
In Tel Aviv we have the Nokia stadium (that's because Nokia sponsored the reconstruction of the thing); will we now have a Microsoft stadium instead ?
Username Validation Without Information Disclosure
... or if you have a wife and kids and six-figures of student loan debt.
But it does feed a family of ten... keeping useless jokes aside; Despite loving my Lumia Windows phone, I am not too thrilled about this acquisition either. I just hope Microsoft's internal politics doesn't ruin Nokia's future!
Discovered Gateway when I was about 13. What a story to expand a young mind! Beyond The Blue Event Horizon and Jem, which I re-read earlier this year, also made big impressions.

His role in supporting other authors can't be overlooked, either -- check out his two-part blog account of how Delaney's Dhalgren got published (1).

One of the other remarkable things I discovered about Pohl through his blog is just how long he was involved with science fiction. This 2009 post talks about what it was like being a hard-core sci-fi fan in the 1930s (2). I read another one (can't find it now) where he talks about joining the first "con" in the same decade, and meeting some early writers. Almost all of them were gone by the time he wrote the blog post ... he was the last one who remembered that era of raw imagination, and had lived to see many future technologies and concepts become reality. His writing reflected a pessimism about humanity, but also a sense of hope.

Thank you, Mr. Pohl, for your gifts to the world.

1. http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/11/chip-delany/

2. http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/09/let-there-be-fan...
I read the tent.io docs and I'm intrigued at their approach to decentralized social networking. I'm more curious about how they will get the traction needed for getting more developers and users to adopt it. I suppose you can always design now and market later, or wait until the world is ready for it, since it is just a protocol waiting to be used.
Generosity leads to evolutionary success, biologists show
> If you only know Python, you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to make an attractive static website.

1. Pelican
2. Frozen Flask
3. Many more!!
It will be too arrogant on our part to think we can't be automated.

If you have used eclipse over the years you will see the kind of gradual automation happening there. Its not the kind of automation that produces code automagically all alone by itself. But software like eclipse pulls the barrier to entry too low to a point even people who understand nothing much about Java or in general about software can comfortable contribute to make a living out of it. And eclipse is only getting better with time. These days you can pretty much code complex Java application without even reading a book. I guess very soon, software like eclipse will fill-in-code-blocks as we express a intention. And then our job will be to stitch those blocks.

This is what is dangerous. And this kind of thing has the potential to drive the supply up very quickly. Thereby the wages decline.

There is no 1-1 mapping, between a automaker and programmer. But the theme is very common.

I am even damn sure we will soon make software a commodity to a point when people can think in terms of abstract software blocks. Just like how a common man can today think of a car in terms of engine, clutch, gear etc.
I'm actually going fairly tired of sites trying to push everything into the client to free up their servers. I routinely run into sites that easily peg an entire core and/or use > 1 GB RAM. A gross generalization, but if you're not able to tune it on the back-end, you probably can't tune it on the front-end, and you're still making your users suffer.
I honestly doubt you'd be saying that if you were part of that 1%!
Skype accounted for an ungodly 167 billion international call minutes in 2012. It is perhaps not fair to belittle them.
>There are a lot of people who would have picked up the attractive, well built, well engineered Nokia devices if they had the platform of Android.

Yeah maybe. There is no guarantee that the outcome would have been more favorable than being bought out by Microsoft.

>Apple obviously is very much in a battle with Android ...

Apple already lost to Android. Last count, Android had 80% of the market. There is zero chance of that changing anytime soon. Apple's saving grace is that they can cut themselves a nice little niche, and make some good margins based on the strength of their brand much like they do with Macs. This will be doubly true if HTML pushes out native apps and and makes the platform largely superfluous again. The war is over however.
I clicked the link thinking it would be code examples and I had to guess the programming language...
Somehow I expect that MS will still have a strong say in how those patents are going to be used. This already happened with attack on VP8 even without any acquisition. MS hand behind it was not even very hidden. It will only get worse now.
There is a difference between being exposed to the outside world and being given the tools to successfully navigate it. Given their limited education, it's hard to imagine many Amish being successful in modern society.
There's only so much RAM in the universe.
One of the founders here-- We recently rebranded the service (used to be https://tent.is), which is still in alpha, to make the distinction between the hosting service and the Tent protocol clearer. This landing page was designed with some products that haven't launched yet in mind, so most of the copy is vague outside of that context. Honestly we weren't expecting any serious traffic until those apps launch later this year, so we've been focused on product, not marketing. (Most of the team is currently experiencing a power outage at home so we missed this being posted to HN as well.)
> This is not a requirement for being a "programmer." It never has been.

Programmers program computers. We call them programmers because they program. If you can't write programs, you're not a programmer. What other definition of "programmer" could you possibly be using?
Steve Ballmer email to Microsoft employees on Nokia acquisition
> This new arrangement changes essentially nothing, but makes official what people long assumed

Precisely! There is no "new" move here. This was just the next step in a series of moves that have already been in motion.

I am curious as to how this will affect Microsoft's relationships with Samsung, HTC, and others.

This does open the door to more hardware options for them which could integrate with their other devices e.g. Kinect, One, potentially any PC running Windows, etc.

I remember Bill Gates talking about Microsoft research in pervasive computing. I imagine Microsoft may be trying to use Nokia's solid hardware business to start delivering 'pervasive' devices/services.
You can use services like CloudFlare.
Maybe it's just a weird coincidence but I've gotten Hebrew about half the time.
It still sounds like you're doing a lot of extra work for little gain vs making a Debian remix or something. I realize writing your own can be more fun, and seem easier, than establishing detailed knowledge of an existing system -- but all of the things you mention could be done quite easily starting from a working Debian distro.

You could fork into a complete distro, like Ubuntu, or just choose a few (core) packages and add some patches.

Either way, I wish your project the best of luck -- any project that tries to revert the asymmetric split of the Internet in "end-users"/consumers and "services" is welcome in my book :-)
Agreed re: Samsung. With this new acquisition, Microsoft now has the ability to control the entire mobile phone experience -- something Apple has had huge success doing for years now. They'll have a high-quality platform to promote their app store and create an interesting ecosystem. This'll also create a distinct image in consumer's minds of what the Microsoft Phone is, similar to what we imagine when we think of the Apple iPhone. Google doesn't have that control, and that puts them at a disadvantage. If I were Google, I would be looking for ways to create a very clear image of what it means to be using a Google Phone that doesn't include X number of vendor handsets running X^^2 versions of Android.
> a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit

I think that the jury is still out on if there will be a significant performance hit. Thunderbolt is like having a direct connection to the PCIe bus, isn't it? Now, you're right about the extra cost, but I think that they will still be sufficiently upgradeable, albeit with more cost and fewer choices.
The press release says Microsoft will acquire Nokia’s Devices & Services business and license Nokia’s patents and mapping services. So what happens to the rest of Nokia?
There was some credible speculation back then that Google bought up Mototorola because its CEO threatened patent warfare with other Android manufacturers, something Google really did not want happening.

Along similar lines, I speculate that Microsoft snapped up Nokia because they threatened starting an Android line of phones.

I think there's a significant business lesson in here somewhere... Something along the lines off "partner with a giant, then become dangerous to it"

Funnily enough, MS also gets a nice patent bonus along with its purchase as Google did with Motorola. However, I think Nokia's patent portfolio is much, much more powerful than Motorola's. This is for three reasons, two publicly evident and one anecdotal:

1) Apple admitted defeat in its patent fight with Nokia, something it hasn't done with anybody else;

2) Nokia has multiple patent lawsuits ongoing, and none of them involve standards essential patents, the one thing most likely to invoke the ire of the antitrust gods;

3) A previous boss of mine knew the head of Nokia R&D in America, and he regaled me with stories of smartphone apps they had working in their labs way back in 2006 that made me go "how the hell do they do that?" Unfortunately, any two-bit app developer can do those things today on any modern smartphone platform using publicly documented API. But I am still curious about what goodies they have hidden away in their labs today.
an unproductive comment on HN?
That's inaccurate. Location services doesn't just use GPS - it depends on data from Google when determining location via wifi, which is more battery efficient. So there are definitely Google-specific elements in there.
> I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro

Guy English made some great points about potential for the new Mac Pro:

"The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with."

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349
Pretty sure even Facebook used this for a few days when they had their auto-updating beta channel. Nobody seemed to really mind.
Google doesn't make the money on Android that Microsoft made on Windows though.
It happened: Microsoft to buy Nokia’s device division for 5.44 billion euros
How come Paul Allen left MS and never looked back?
I'm not convinced it's been declared 1,340,000,000,000 times, but I get your point
2982 (increase in sales) x .15 (assumed tip amount) = + $447 divided by all tipped employees. But you have to remember even many small chain restaurants have 15-25 tipped employees this nets to very little increase in income per tipped employee and zero increased income for non-tipped employees. Next, subtract from that small increase all the money they used to make from theft and overall they are likely coming out of the deal with less income.
If they said it before and they were wrong, surely that means they will be wrong forever!
Do people disagree?

I've met plenty of humble men and plenty of excellent female programmers. That seems to disprove both theories, as far as I can see.

Anyone wanting to prove a universal in the face of counterexamples is welcome to have a go though :)
Thanks for checking it out. As you discovered Cupcake is a hosting service for Tent. We'll also be launching a few apps in the coming months (Dropbox and Droplr type apps powered by Tent). Until then most of the marketing copy is a bit out of place and for most users the service isn't that useful (the Tent app ecosystem isn't that mature yet).
Remembering John Mainstone: Guardian of the Pitch Drop
Why would Zuckerberg or Sandberg be good candidates from Microsoft CEO? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to slight Facebook, but in my mind Facebook and Microsoft operate on two completely different wavelengths. I'm confident they wouldn't perform poorly, but I find it hard to believe they could provide the type of leadership and vision Microsoft needs right now. I'm just interested in hearing your thinking.

Also not really thrilled about Carly Fiorina, didn't she gut HP R&D division? I'm not sure your list is actually serious. Either way I'm doubtful Elop will become CEO given that he wasn't really able to make anything good come from Nokia.
personal is no more a mandatory section.
The twitter logo is outdated.
I feel like my personal site should reject all current web design practice and just have Times with the occasional {h1} black on #ccc with #00f links. You'll never come up to the standard people expect in this world of ajax, tumblr and css3, so why not just do it CERN and Netscape style?

Dark green on yellow is actually the easiest to read, but that's garish.
> I just hope Microsoft's internal politics doesn't ruin Nokia's future!

How bright do you think Nokia's future was prior to this?
Cool game, and nicely presented! I got a 250, then 400.

It might be good to ask the user where they are from (non-intrusively of course, maybe a simple country selector or IP lookup) to get another dimension on the statistics. Or what languages they already know as well might be interesting when looking at the results.
Time Management for a happy life
The importance of Time Management for a happy life
This will inevitably draw comparisons to Knuth's METAFONT and Computer Modern font family (as it should). It does suggest, to me, one particularly interesting use case: one could automatically measure parameters for an existing font, and generate similar-looking characters that might be missing from the font (e.g., small caps, Greek letters, Cyrillic, etc.). I programmed this once many years ago, using some ridiculously complicated PostScript and METAFONT programming, but I've since forgotten how that old code works.
MS paid less for Nokia handset business than for Skype.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Goodbye to the Nokia brand, soon only to be mentioned in rose-tinted lookbacks. Mobile phones, built like a brick, running for days.