skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "...I think Microsoft ought to abandon Windows Phone. The war is over, and iOS and Android won."

That's remarkably short-sighted. The first iPhone was released only 6 years ago, Android 5 years ago. You really think that Microsoft - a company with nearly infinite runway, an enormous R&D investment and serious history - is going to down tools after a few years of frustration? Not likely.

The prize is too big and consumers too fickle to just give up.
I think Microsoft sees Smartphones as strategic must have for long term.

MS saw that Nokia is the only player in the Windows market and Samsung is never going to be big on MS. They just bought the hardware and are making Windows phones into closed platform like iPhone is.

I don't think that Samsung and others are going to continue making windows phones after MS bought Nokia.
I just call it "the computer" since that's what it is.
> I don't like companies abusing sites like Hacker News and posting links to their products.

For what it's worth: I work at Stripe, and we didn't submit this story. If you've any suggestions as to what we should do to make the submissions less annoying, I'm all ears.

I think it's just the case that a lot of people in the various countries tend to care. For example, to take another benchmark, Stripe was a Twitter trending topic in both Ireland and Dublin when we launched this morning: https://twitter.com/TrendsDublin/status/374809599691325440, https://twitter.com/TrendsIreland/status/374806974908477440.
Mercurial's perfect setup
That is an interesting point. Microsoft has now became a direct competitor of Samsung and others on the Windows Phone marked.
I have implemented a few payment gateways, none were particularly taxing for even a novice developer.
10 Programming Languages in 10 minutes
It's quite a common stylistic thing. I know a number of people who use it, including my highly literate, Philosophy & Literature grad, professionally trained secretary, Convent educated mother.
Almost no major producer of Android phones in China (mainland) IIRC, has deployed or would deploy Google Play, perhaps as a result of both their marketing strategies, that favors some local mobile Internet service providers, and consequence of the back-off stance of Google to the Chinese govn't, the cause of which is quite complicated though. As status quo, Google's services are largely compromised due to unknown or you-guess-what reasons.
I have the notion that bad voters are canceled out by sticking in votes on the other count. That makes it harder for them to sniff out the fact that they don't really count.
Elop's job was to drive to the price. Microsoft wanted, and now has, the IP.
Looking at eBay listings, lots of used Hackintoshes are offered, but very few are sold.

If OP wanted to successfully sell his computer, he would have to put Windows on it before offering it on eBay. And even then, I don’t think he’d get much more for it than the price of the Windows license.

On the other hand, had OP spent his $800 on a Mac mini, he would be able to sell it for close to retail price. Even after a year, he could easily resell that computer for $600.
Actually I don't think that was intentional at all. Nokia failing so miserably with Windows Phone can't have been anyones plan. And if they had succeeded like expected, Nokia would still be worth too much for Microsoft to consider buying it.
HVPT is of course only part of the solution; I hope I didn't make it sound like a cure-all. Being able to distinguish the phonemes that you hear is just the first step, and it should logically be followed by learning to produce the sound distinctions in question yourself. And it is definitely a two-way feedback loop in that the better you hear the differences, the better you produce them, and vice versa, just as it is for infants learning their native language. So a more complete training method would combine HVPT with ways to have your own pronunciations scored to see how well you are producing the sounds of the target language.

This is I feel a relatively neglected part of non-native language education, and it is very common for people to have spoken a non-native language for years without learning to distinguish native sound pairs. So good luck with your efforts to help people learn better, and I hope you share the results with us.
Are those WP's in the hands of customers or still in the sales chanel?

The report [1] speaks of sales and actually claims that 42% of the sales are actually coming from feature phone owners (who probably like the price point of the Lumia 520 and all). Retail channels are not feature phone owners ;).

Btw, nu.nl is not a source, really not a source.

Of course it's a source, but you can dispute its reliability. For a substantial part of the Dutch population it is reliable enough to read daily. And it's not as if they have an agenda here.

Tweakers.net is also not a source, too biased (i know you didn't mention tweakers, just sayin').

So, what's the point of dragging Tweakers.net into the discussion?

[1] http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/Global/News/Record-share-for...
Well, the word "computer" leaps to mind. Maybe "processor enclosure" if you prefer more wordy descriptions.
My question is, at what point does it become incumbent on the language to provide a more meaningful idiom for this kind of expression? I think the point at which constructs like this leak into your official documentation is a pretty good line to start thinking about it. :)
At the moment we only take BTC because this project is taking part on the coursera "Startup Engineering" competition and the amount of Tweets and BTC are the main ranking values.
Bill Gates Will Grant You $100,000 to Invent a Next-Gen Condom
Ask HN: Freelancers, How much time do you spend on marketing?
How much time do you spend on marketing? also, please specify the marketing activities you do.
this makes Elop the most dangerous trojan horse of all times
"A gaming platform doesn’t have to compete with iOS on its own terms, but it does have to at least match it in the areas that are relevant to gaming."

I wonder if this is true. I'd like to think that, if you're doing a game console, you don't necessarily have to match Apple at "ownership experience". Like, you can maybe make up for that by putting, say, buttons, on your console. Or Pokeymans.
"There's no money in being an Android vendor if except if you're Samsung" is a silly statement. Nokia _could_ have done just like Amazon, and created their own platform based off Android, but with no ties to the Google ecosystem. With Meego, they could even have made a compatibility layer allowing developers to easily port their Android apps.

However, that plan would only have worked if they did it just around the time when Android became popular. Now it's probably too late.
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Offer you the information of all famous and top Chengdu attractions like Chengdu Panda Base, Dujiangyan, Wulong Natural Reserve, etc
I hit next twice after guessing correctly, which triggered a Python KeyError.

Traceback: http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe
Nice. I was wondering how are you generating the thumbnails server side.. Did you use an approach like phantom.js or just an api?
Also, I do agree that the title or context would be nice to be seen the whole time, not just upon hover.
3 Fundamental Components for Your Small Business to Grow
Agreed. Phones aside, the viability of Chromebooks goes a long way to showing how open the OS market is compared to the desktop market a decade or two ago.
What is the ROI of the time you invested in your comment? ;)
Here is the Microsoft Strategic Rationale presetation:
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.c...
Jeffrey Bezos aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the Washington Post
Where did you get your crack pipe?

Mobile situation is great. They are growing and now they have control over Nokia, they can do an Xbox i.e. make it succeed even if it's a loss leader for a bit. Not only that they still have piles of WinCE industrial devices going out of the door.

Not done much on the web. Are you blind? Office 365, SharePoint, Azure, Skype, Bing (which isn't as shit as people like to say) at least 3 complete web stacks, the most complete API implementation across all products, devdiv. They do everything Google does already apart from social which they leave to Facebook as after all they threw some cash in that direction. Oh and they do all that on the desktop AS WELL.

Nobody using their cloud - yeah right: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/microsoft-azure-sal...

I think you are suffering from what I term as "the other reality distortion field" which is where people are blind to the actual facts on the table.

There is a huge difference between the legendary portrayal of Microsoft by the tech media and the reality.

Just watch the reality doesn't bite you on the arse one day.
Microsoft wanted an ecosystem of competing handset makers like Android, where they could just make the OS and rake in the money; they have realized they aren't going to get it, and the one handset maker who took the sucker bet was dying fast. So (I predict) they have decided to switch to the XBox model, where the hardware is in-house, subsidized, and used to gain market share.
I spend 8-10 hours a week marketing. Activities that I consider marketing include, attending networking events, writing blog posts and sending out newsletters to my clients.
'Stealing' free
I'm guessing that he's being a bit sarcastic since this would be an extremely hodgepodged setup, but I have thought about doing something like this for a home server/personal computer setup.

My thoughts where to have something like a rackmounted server machine in my basement with multiple storage drives, oodles of RAM, CPU, and a video card with it all running under an ESX (or whatever) install. Over the hypervisor I could then have running a headless NAS OS (e.g. UnRAID or FreeNAS) for my backups/media/etc and then a full-blown gaming PC running Windows with the GPU being virtually attached to it. Then (oh there's more) I could run all of my keyboard, video, mouse, and USB cables for the virtual gaming PC up through my house to where my desk is located. I figure that with this setup I could consolidate a several physical computers (gaming pc, NAS, etc) into one workhorse computer which would save space and possibly some electricity.
Quote: "If you manage to develop a condom that guys won’t complain about having to wear, you will win $100,000 from the Gates Foundation ..."

This is misleading, verging on false. What's being offered is not a prize for a successful design, it's a grant to support development of a promising idea. You don't submit a finished design and wait for your $100K "prize", you submit a proposal for a research program and hope it merits support.

In other words, it's not a lottery, it's science.
Both skill and luck play a role in outcomes in business, sports & investing
Could have got a previous gen off ebay. Lotsa cores, lotsa ram etc.
"The secretary might still have quit anyway - it probably depends on the level of BIG."

She'd either get BIG and her salary, or just BIG. Compared to the previous scenario of salary vs welfare. The motivation to stay employed would be greater with BIG, surely. The husband would receive BIG regardless of her salaried situation.
You'll probably have to ask him that.

As a macbook owner myself, I can tell you you have to use one regularly to notice that the build quality and attention to design is just much better.

Solid unibody aluminum. Auto-dimming display. Backlit keyboard. Great battery life. A trackpad that is pleasant to use and works for scrolling, gestures, and moving the mouse. Tight OS integration with all of these hardware features. It's pretty clear whoever designed these features actually used these features. I've used cheap laptops before and they get produced with shitty features like fingerprint sensors that barely work. It's as if no one actually bothered to use the features they slap onto cheap Windows laptops, because if they did, it's pretty easy to notice how useless or unusable a lot of the features are.

Most people spend the money on a commodity windows computer because they need a computer. When people spend the extra money on a mac, they do so because they want a mac. Point being, people buy a mac and pay the extra because every feature they include has a purpose and has been tested to be actually useful and not just a marketing gimmick.
If you think that the UK and Ireland have been frozen in aspic since the 1920s, that suggests that you are very ignorant of the great many things that have happened in those countries, both of which would now be barely recognisable to anyone from the 20s.

If pg's ancestors emigrated from England, that is not in fact a judgement on it. The UK has exported a great many people to every corner of the globe, and received them in kind, because it is a very globally engaged collection of islands. By your twisted logic this must make it just about the worst country in the world.
And put your secondary card in a pair of these: http://gearjunkie.com/zip-it-gear-socks-with-zippers
How does 4. ballmer retirement play into things?
Mini is 2.3 and uses Google Play.
I had the 7650 in 2004. It had third party apps and I believe it was the first camera phone also. I was a die-hard Nokia fan, even purchasing a full-price N97 before jumping ship to Android in 2010
I bought a Lumia 800 as my first smartphone and I'm not quite happy with it.

- It lost at least 60% of its value in less than a year (price for a new one dropped by that much)

- MS wants me to pay them if I want to build an app to use on my own phone

- And after I've paid them I can only put three apps that aren't published on there. If I publish them in the app store and would like to use them myself I have to buy my own apps. So basically just give them money.

- No significant software updates

All in all, it's a good dumb phone, but it's not a great smartphone.
That's true, although while noticing the effect from a drug gets a good chunk of the way there, there's still a huge amount of effort after that which goes into getting it approved and to market. And vardenafil seems to have been researched purely with ED in mind.

That said, ED isn't really a perfect poster child for the kind of medical research I'm talking about. It's just the best one to use with a one-liner because it conveys the point effectively, and because penises are funny. Other examples include treatments for male pattern baldness and second/third generation antihistamines.

With the former, the pharmacological options are all again opportunistic situations, although the point about investing in getting them to market still applies. With the latter, that is not the case. And although there's no denying that they have vastly improved the quality of life for people with serious allergy problems, there's also no denying that the main reason for the investment put into them was helping people with the spring sniffles (as evidenced by the fact that their approved doses are set so low that they are barely of any use to anyone (otherwise they wouldn't have passed muster for "non-drowsy" so that they could get fast track approval from the FDA)).
I tried that with QEMU once. It sort of works but I didn't really go too far into it. I did it more to see whether it could be done or not. That's actually the only time I've used OS X by the way, so I might have missed some things that didn't work. Either way I wouldn't recommend it. The install took about 8 hours and the whole thing was rather slow. VirtualBox might do better though.
Hardly any coders among GCSE ICT entrants despite student increase
> This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays) and you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other images of your site).

Also, browsers which aren't MSIE can use PNG, GIF (including animated) or JPEG favicons.

> I think by now all browsers support <link rel="shortcut icon">

Only rel=icon is necessary in most browser, rel="shortcut icon" is for MSIE lte 9.

> but all of them still request /favicon.ico

(if no icon is specified)
What pedagogical purpose does this serve? I'm a fan of tough love from teachers. I'd rather get a low grade and learn a great deal than a high grade and learn nothing. For some instructors, part of that is being willing to say the equivalent of "this is complete shit" when your work is, in fact good, but not up to standards.

But the best ones do it in private, or in written feedback, or generally to everyone as a motivational tactic. All of that I'm willing to tolerate, and I've seen some (not many) user acerbic brutal feedback to achieve results out of me I'd never find possible.

But never have I seen a teacher signal out particular students, compare their work openly, while holding up other particular students as examples of what not to do.

Is that good or bad? The principle of rewarding individual excellence is good, and the attitude could even be forgiven in certain circumstances.

But there's a way to do that without being a dick. And if you're going to be a dick, you better b the extremely rare person that knows how to be a dick properly and effectively, usually with an undercurrent of good humor and in the pursuit of ultra-high standards.
I feel like the N900 was very close to what they needed. Take that, give it "minor" features like support for portrait mode (!), give it some modern hardware with a capacitive touch screen, and I think they would have really had something.

I didn't like the UI refresh in the N9 as much. It felt like they took a few steps back.

It did seem like Maemo/Meego was mismanaged, which is sad because it did have potential. I have no idea what went on at Nokia, but my guess would have to be that they never fully committed to it; it was just somebody's side-project, and all the talk that it would be their next-gen primary platform was just lip service. As if nobody expected it would ever ship "for real".
There's an argument that Nokia wouldn't have been stable now if Elop never took the job. It would have failed in Finland instead of now potentially failing in Redmond.
Definitely not normal. I covered this in much greater detail in another post http://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/2013/07/22/ios-app-prom...
Government-controlled email service financed through adverts... not very trust-inspiring.
Just because it's a regex does not mean you can't document it. There are many regex tracers that can tell you exactly where a match fails. Plus regexes condense a lot of information in small spaces, which makes them easier (imho) to debug. Most other parsing syntaxes are one-offs, and very verbose.

And your average parsing library is not going to be using boyer-moore state machine parsing like you can easily achieve with regexes. It's complex, terse, fast, and the code that will be running your match is probably better debugged than any code you could hope to produce (it's most programmers' understanding of regexes that could use some debugging). Regexes also just make sense if you know the theory behind the state machines.

So how about this way of writing the regex :

regex = r"""(?x) # Extended syntax (ignores \n and whitespace, allows comments)
# Regex to match email addresses
\b # Word boundary
(?P<username>\w+) # Username part
@
(?P<domain>[\w.]+) # Domain
\b # Word boundary
"""

# Example use
import re
m = re.match(regex, "john@snow")

print m.group('username') # john
print m.group('domain') # snow

I find parser combinators very hard to use. I wrote parser combinator libraries in C and one in java thinking it'd be easier to use than a parser generator like ANTLR, and I've since rethought the process. ANTLR studio is just so useful for writing a parser to example data.

There's also the concern that parsers are strictly more expressive than regexes. If you need that, then regexes are simply out. However, most parser generators allow you to easily combine regex(-like) tokenization with parsing.
There's a world of difference between German layout (with only a few extra letters) and Cyrillic layout (which completely replaces Latin letters).
Why '10% Market Share' must be Microsoft's mobile goal
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It seems Stephen Elope is all set to complete his professional circle but of course with an unexpected promotion. If things fall in place for this lucky guy, he is likely to lead Microsoft, where he'd learnt his initial lessons of leadership.
Please HN: Help our UX research on "Video editing habits". Under 5 min.
Make sure your screen is clean. If there is dirt that triggers a touch, that happens to be in the text, the cursor will jump there.
Be careful about using works like "cannot" in terms of what is possible to trust regarding hardware that is in possession of a potentially adversarial party and systems that assume said cards are secure. There are a variety of attacks that are possible (pre-play, attacks that can make a stolen card work without a PIN, etc.) and it is likely that in the future it will be easier to perform these attacks. It is a standard risk/convenience continuum and everyone has staked out a different portion of that zone. In the US the merchant pays a lower commission on debit card (e.g. with PIN) transactions as well for the same reasons, which is why they will tend to suggest that option or offer it up as the default when you use a card that can be either debit or credit. When I suggested that there were only two systems I was simplifying a bit too much and you definitely caught me on that one.

In most places it seems that there are two (and sometimes three depending on how mobile phone payments are cleared) dominant e-payment formats, one which puts the fraud burden on the merchant and one that puts it on the customer. The size of the burden is usually set by regulation and the level that this is set at tends to inform the nature of the security at the endpoints vs. what happens at the middle when clearing and reconciling transactions.
6. Elop becomes new MS CEO
"Most of the phones running 2.3 aren't shipping with Google Play (is Play even compatible?)"

This is wrong, Google Play is compatible with every Android device. (link: http://source.android.com/compatibility/)

I don't know where you got this information from, but I can assure you that 99,9999% of all Android devices you'll find outside of China will have Google Play on it.

"These are drastically underpowered devices. Even if an app can run on 2.2, it doesn't mean it'll run well (or at all) on sub-$100 hardware."

Drastically underpowered like an iPhone4/4S? Most 2.2 - 2.3.3 devices out there are just 1-2 year old phones, so of course they are underpowered compared to todays standards.

Still, most apps will run on those devices the same way they still run on an iPhone4/4S - in a few cases slow, but still usable for the mayority of consumers.
I agree. I don't see why this isn't
like saying

> "...I think Microsoft ought to
abandon the Xbox. The war is
over, and Sony and Nintendo won."

a decade or so ago.