skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Downvoted you because this looks like astroturfing. New account, seemingly random nickname, a persona matching the target audience of this site and several postings with purely positive content and a style that doesn't look right on HN.

That said, the Surface Pro 2 looks really appealing.
.. but where are the ads? I don't see any.

EDIT: Oops. I've had an ad blocker installed so long I forgot it even existed. :-) Leaving my comment up though to save this discussion thread in my history. Nice site!
I'm at around $12000/month REVENUE from my side business doing online machining. Unfortunately, it's neither as passive as I'd like it to be, and much of the money goes back out as expenses.
I wrote an userscript to solve this:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037
Yeah, I see the streaming functionality as almost bigger announcement than the OS.

It's quite possible that one could stream into any other machine including tablets, laptops and even phones. This would enable playing your full Steam library from anywhere with decent enough connection (on both sides), especially games where input lag is not that big issue.
> some unethical MBA behind the scenes

Yes, because MBA's have a monopoly on unethical behavior.
The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is.

Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and one could raise a year's worth of this money by successfully applying for a single additional credit card. (Not that I recommend bootstrapping with credit cards. But it has been done.)

Of course, it may be the case that a company could improve customer satisfaction, and therefore revenue, by double-digits by improving performance on optimized hardware. But if this is the case, where is the discussion of that? Where is the data: A/B testing, customer satisfaction, churn rate, monthly revenue? They should be front and center.

† Without getting into the reduced redundancy, the additional complexity of hosting multiple unrelated services on each instance, the "additional maintenance" referred to in the post, the lack of server capacity to cover emergencies and staging and load testing and continuous integration, and the risk involved in switching infrastructure out from under a working business-critical application... any estimate which doesn't include the cost of engineering time is wrong. All changes have engineering costs. Just talking about this idea is costing engineering time.
If this is aimed at a niche market, I suppose it makes more sense. I was just under the impression that Microsoft has hopes of remaining a major player in the computer business; if it's content with marginalizing itself into a niche, so be it.
I see now. I didn't know there was a private API for App Store VPN clients. Cool, I will have to switch to using OpenVPN.
It's a stepping stone.
If you're going to get picky about rhetorical devices, this is the one you're currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Interesting! I saw the book a few weeks ago and wondered who put it together. I assume the letters are public? How did you get the extra material? And do you share any income with Buffet? (That would feel strange, but would also make sense)
CCBill, SegPay and Achbill.
If you look at the portfolio of 25+ companies currently fundraising on Wefunder, I think the results speak for themselves. All except one went to an incubator AND used us.

Most of the YC companies do not need capital. Most have raised significant amounts from very well-known investors.

We don't replace the current system of fundraising. We're just another tool founders can use.

We solve the quality problem by making it a no brainer for the startup - quick and fast money from a crowd of passionate users and customers of your product. But only having one shareholder on your cap table.
And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?
Less all expenses to launch, design, develop, manufacture, ship the current phones, they are at a good pace of getting a return on their investment. Don't look at it too linearly.
Keep in mind that this is the first of three announcements that they've, err, announced: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

The second is in 48hrs, and almost definitely something related to the SteamBox. So it's too soon to speak of their intentions "for the time being".
Casual vs Hardcore gaming. If they announce the console first, and it's not able to run the latest and greatest games on their highest resolution they stymie the idea of being able to run SteamOS on a high end gaming rig.

This way people are thinking about how they can run SteamOS on their existing hardware before thinking they need to run it on a Steambox.
Because if you can be working on a product right now you don't need outside investment?
Show HN: Ruby Warrior
I suspect that like Android, they're going to leverage Linux-the-kernel, but have a user space that is alien to the one common in current Linux servers and desktops.

I can understand: I'd say good riddance to some parts of the userspace myself coughX windows systemcough, but having a few different userspaces is like having the UNIX wars all over again.

PS "The UNIX wars" has a modern space opera ring to it, like something out of an Orson Scott Card book (or JMS script. Or maybe your-favourite author. I don't read enough Sci-Fi to know).
And now I have an urge to write a comics^W graphic novel adaptation of the UNIX wars. It'll be glorious!
Let's hope they don't got the route of Android, which is perhaps the most successful consumerization of Linux to date, wherein they allow hardware vendors bog it down with crapware...
It depends what you mean by "fair." One could just as easily argue that it's not fair to compare last year's 5 + 4s sales to this year's 5s + 5c sales, since this the latter is two brand new models.
What I am saying is that you are accusing Schneier of setting up a straw man when in fact you and he have a difference of opinion. This is not a straw man. He left nothing out of his assertion. However you did. Care to respond to what I actually said?
The bid is US$9 per share, but it traded at $10.50 around the announcement?[0] Are they really going to get away with paying below last marked price...

0: https://www.google.com/finance?q=BlackBerry&ei=64NAUpDFA8OXw...
I wonder if history will repeat itself, will Valve be the next Apple?

Apple took FreeBSD and makes it into OSX.
>
Valve takes Linux and makes it into SteamOS.

Apple makes iTunes for music, unifying digital music download
>
Valve makes Steam for games, unifying digital game download

Apple make IPOD for digital music playing
>
Valve make (SteamBox?) for game playing

Damn I wish I could own some Valve stock...
I'd take the femtoduino over the digistump in this case. The atmega328p is vastly superior to it's low pin cousin, attiny85. I'm sure you could engineer the atmega328p to also talk directly to usb as well as it's merely using the V-USB project.
HTML5 Belt Buckle
Making $4000 + / Month profit . Running a consulting firm. I have two direct employees and few pass-through 's .
Revenue is much bigger a number at $100,000 + /Month . Effort is very less to maintain this profit as only spend few hours /month to run payroll
, invoicing clients and make timely payment out to the vendors.

pass-through : Consultants not employed by my company but work for my clients.
Ugh. I know Fairfax VERY well. Prem Watsa is often called Warren Buffett of the North, and he may very well be. He's a great investor, and has done VERY well in investing the float of their insurance business. But, BUT, I think he's way in over his head here. Buffett himself will not touch technology companies, or businesses he doesn't understand. He has also said the technology world is way too competitive, and that there is hardly a "moat" that can protect a business from competition, etc... I don't understand why Prem is going after Blackberry. It is clearly in one of the most competitive spaces in technology, and there is no good crystal ball to see what the future holds. I mean, for every Apple, there are lots of companies like US Robotics.

It is why I shy away from technology companies with my investments.
Besides the things iPhone copied blatantly from Android phones (Notification center, 'Today', Quick toggle settings panel, new multi-shot camera etc.), you have:
100 things iPhone 5s-5s can't do that Android can.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVTrazT99Ps
All they're really saying is that they want to maintain control without outsiders. And to really do that, they have to convert the company back into a private one, cut their losses by removing the deadweight in the 4500 employees, then stick to a core business that they know will keep them alive.
His attitude on academica and proofs are different from most contemporary researchers/scholars, something that he has talked about extensively in his books and other writings. Being well-read in the classics and spending a lot of his time on the trade floor probably has something to do with it. As hackers I think this attitude isn't that far off, when it comes to the hacker/compsci "divide".

While I see your point about the quote, I think his intent of the definition is very clear. If you are curious and want to know what he means by something, he's very active on both facebook and twitter.

As a specific example, you have probably heard of the saying "premature optimization is the root of all evil". This is a rule which holds in pretty much any domain. It's obviously not a theorem, but you can still talk about the payoff of the rule. This is what Taleb means when he says "probability in the real world" - it's all about payoffs and consequences.
I agree with you that this is technically a solved problem. It's not difficult to develop a system that lets apps run on both architectures without users having to think about this.

I'm talking about the management decision that only Metro apps can run on RT, which is such a stupid limitation that even Microsoft sees the need to bypass it to get Office on an RT tablet.
PS3 runs FreeBSD likes Android runs Linux.

That is, they may share a kernel and some tools, but the user spaces are mostly alien.
Extend.js
Feedback is very welcome. As the site says, ExtendJS does not do much on it's own but I found it to be a powerful framework to build on, hopefully so does HN.
I suspect it's to do with the 100% uptime they should be aiming for.
They might have some other interesting stuff they're working on as well.
Fairfax Financial Holdings (TSX: FFH) is an $8.3 billion property and casualty insurance company. They are an acquisitive bunch, having spent $4.7 billion on deals since 2011 (37% of their enterprise value as of 30 June 2013 or 57% of their market capitalisation as of today). All their acquisitions since 1997 have been in the banking, insurance or shipping/transportation spaces, with the exceptions of EFI Global (environmental services).

Their CEO, Prem Watsa, is a value investor. Fairfax's IRR is around 20% - this means Blackberry needs to yield about $840 million in cash a year to tread water. That seems unlikely. Instead, I think we will see a spin-off of the handset business and patent portfolio with a retention of the cash-flow generating service business.

What's the service business worth? It made $3.2 billion annualised the last quarter (Q2 FY 2014), $3.9 billion in FY 2013, and $4.1 billion in FY 2012. Let's assume it keeps declining at 8% a year. Let's further assume it can return at least the entire company's FY 2013 40% gross margin. Guess what 40% of $2.9 billion declining at 8% annually and discounted at 20% is worth over the next 10 years? $4.7 billion. Thus, if decline can be maintained at no more than 8% while margins are maintained at 40% and the cost of capital capped at 20%, the handset business, patent portfolio, and any terminal value after 2023 are freebies.
How Streak Tracks Down App Engine Datastore Bugs
I think it's the same as the reasoning behind limiting any form of gambling -- there is a savviness imbalance between the gamblers and the house, and the potential cost to society of gamblers losing more than they can afford is thought to outweigh the benefit of people being completely free to make their own decisions with their own money.
This post by Forbes would say otherwise, but I stopped reading after they said average righteous blogger in leftish spheres:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/freekvermeulen/2010/11/22/does-a...
I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on http://pizzacodes.com. About 3 or 4 months ago I switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just over $600/month again.
Making about $800/month from 2 Android apps. Not much but it keeps me alive.

Trying to release some games and see if I can increase that amount in the next few months...
Care to elaborate? How much risk is there to the site owner which accidentally hosts the content?
This is perhaps a bit like how an SLR-owning photographer would have looked at cameraphones when they came out. Or how a mainframe programmer looked at microcomputers.

They, and you, were absolutely right to observe that these devices were massively less capable than the existing devices, and to foresee that they would never become as capable, and to explain that the reduced capability translates directly into less freedom to create, and to predict that they would not replace the existing devices.

Where they might have gone wrong (i note that you do not!) would be to conclude that these devices were therefore never going to be successful. They did not displace the existing devices from their niches; they carved out an entirely new niche, surviving by making small profits from huge numbers of people.

The boosters are talking rubbish when they say that 3D printing will revolutionise manufacturing. But it might just revolutionise DIY.
That doesn't make any sense. If you can handle ~20ms of latency from your TV itself, how is <1ms of latency from a local ethernet connection a problem?
It's been updated to say "less than 50% of Gmail users" now. We're seeing it across most/all of our accounts.
well, the next icon on this page http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

sure looks like a box enclosing the circle that turned out to be the OS. It's not really a separate announcement as this is all part of one unified event.
>> ... or move it to your own server as we did.

I'm curious ... have you factored in your power costs? People costs (or opportunity costs if your existing staff is re-allocated to server admin tasks)? Additional cost of space for your on-prem setup? Have you factored in the cost of potential downtime? Single points of failure?
No, rather it's that as a founder you have limited time to expend, and spending effort getting traction will have a much larger return than trying to optimize for the various requests of angel investors.

There are also enough quality investors out there who use signals other than hand-wavy financial reports that you could be spending your time to get.
Do you understand that most people do not take painkillers for more than a few days at a time, and rarely at anything like the maximum daily dose?

You're worried about effects that occur with chronic high dosages. That's not the typical use-case.
"there may be some unethical MBA behind the scenes..."

This is an unnecessary smear on MBAs. There are bad ones out there, and there are plenty of good ones. Just like with any other degree.

Your points are completely sound, and I agree, but it's time we ended the knee-jerk hatred of those three letters. There are YC-backed startups with MBAs at the helm, and there is an increasing number of engineers with MBAs or dual degrees.
Maybe this? But who really knows, with Valve:

"SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers."
I got this working by creating a new user in Chrome and searching from my default local https://www.google.com.hk/ site.

The following attempts all failed: logging out, a different browser, /ncr , incognito, and tor browser. The US site on the new user account also didn't work. Interestingly, all of the u/jfoster examples worked the first time.
These guys are asking for very specific prices on their website. They must have some kind of valuation behind it. I just need to know how they came up with this number. Also, both IRS and SEC have rules and guidelines on how to do valuation on startups - they use things like committed potential customers, founder reputation, CVs and things like this. Every startup has to do valuation before issuing stock options for example.
Not sure of the OP's point, but when I saw Fairfax, first thing I thought of was Fairfax County: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax,_Virginia
Looks like around 9 million, if you assume 1 phone per person. One way Apple does it is by having good marketing, but I think the more important way they do it is by having consistently excellent consumer satisfaction ratings for their mobile products.
LinkThing is a bookmarking tool for people like myself - who have wide-ranging interests and bookmark a tonne, and are looking for a fast/powerful way to organize. Its not social or "beautiful," but it is effective (IMHO!).

LinkThing is private by default - bookmarks are not shared or public in any way, unless you create a Public Page and share that URL with others.

This is my perpetual side project. The most recent iteration is of the "less is more" variety - I've stripped out a bunch of features that weren't particularly well thought-out, and refocused on the core - tagging, searching, sorting, etc.

Thoughts/comments welcome!

Cheers!
Hmm, they could be fishing to help value their existing stake.
"The email delays are affecting less than 50% of Gmail users."

That is a HUGE change from 0.024% this has been changed from a "Service disruption" to a "Service outage".

Also, not sure if it is dependent on your Google login, but mine are all in EST.
For what it's worth, if you're just looking to get at the innards of a method, Pry does this job admirably.

https://gist.github.com/cheald/6674718

https://github.com/pry/pry/wiki/Source-browsing

Or to get the source as a string:

> require 'pry'
> Nokogiri.method(:HTML).source
=> " def HTML thing, url = nil, encoding = nil, options = XML::ParseOptions::DEFAULT_HTML, &block\n Nokogiri::HTML::Document.parse(thing, url, encoding, options, &block)\n end\n"
Don't you know? Your continued use of the service constitutes acceptance of any and all ToS changes with or without notification, in perpetuity.
“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.)

Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested, but I'm definitely in favor of building a strong professional network and having a good portfolio of work.
That's what I assumed was happening when I first saw that photo, hence my disappointment.
Thankfully, this will be legal in mid-2014, when the SEC finishes implementing the JOBS Act.

In the 1930's - pre-Internet - people were more easily scammed by traveling salesmen selling oil wells and such.

We have a lot more information at our fingertips these days.
Flywheel is completely legit! If you're a designer you have to check it out!
History and Myth of the 10x Engineer
That's actually a good call. I'm already an affiliate from another blog I have. I've been meaning to change those links and I hadn't gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder.
Minus the up-front commitment and the management fee.
EA won't be there. Blizzard won't be there. Steam is increasingly becoming a great indie platform where the only AAA titles we see on it are Valve's.
Now that's interesting. Please do share more about your disposition away from revenue. What does that mean to you?
Just wondering, why would an Insurance company buy BlackBerry? What are they planning to do with it?
Software performance optimization of the Bullet physics engine with Pareon
I'd love to see them just publish docs so we can get good drivers instead. Bluescreens from video drivers are still a problem on windows, it is an even bigger problem on linux with fewer resources going into making the driver, and fewer people using them to serve as paying testers. Nvidia and ati/amd have both made it very clear that they either do not have the desire or they do not have the resources to make good drivers. So let the open source community do it for you.
You are missing an understanding of the complexities of the credit card payments industry.
There is an ISO standard for 1.8.7 and RubySpec for all versions.
Lost Decade Games - HTML5 until the Crypt.. and Beyond
getting a 404.
OneMonthRails Y Combinator investor day pitch
I received a promo email from WeFunder this morning. To mark the occasion of the change in the law, this was the messaging:

To celebrate, we are featuring great 25 startups from Y Combinator, Techstars, and MIT!

Clicking through to the "Raise Funding" page, which includes the pricing, this message appears at the bottom:

We offer a 100% discount to select high-tech startups that recieved funding from Y Combinator, SV Angel, or Andreessen Horowitz.

Not to dump on the accomplishments of the featured startups and those who have received funding from SV Angel or Andreessen Horowitz, but the message to everyone else seems to be: It doesn't matter how great your team is or how well you execute, if you are not part of the incubator/angel A-list, don't expect any breaks from us when it comes to promotions or pricing.
Chromium Blog: Saying Goodbye to Our Old Friend NPAPI
Thanks for that tip! I never knew about it!
Well, sure, for a consumer device that I use on my couch in the evenings, I certainly don't need LTE. But the Pro seems pretty geared towards business, right? For business travelers this makes a huge, huge difference, though. And it seems to me that the high end Pro version is probably exclusively targeted at business users, at its price.
Very interesting strategy. Thanks for sharing.
> What is the course of this delay?

Is there a patch?
Platform updates and the rate of innovation
We need to distinguish between the curvature of a specific location versus the curvature of the universe as a whole.

As I understand it, for a universe that's being uniformly accelerated, by for example dark energy, its overall curvature should be negative. In the absence of dark energy, and for a universe whose masses possess escape velocity (no more and no less), the classic zero-energy assumption of modern Big Bang models, the overall curvature is zero (i.e. flat). For a universe that has less than escape velocity and will recollapse, an idea that has now been pretty much abandoned, the curvature is positive.

The escape-velocity zero-curvature universe has an interesting property -- it has zero net energy, i.e. gravitational potential energy is exactly balanced by kinetic energy. This means the universe can appear spontaneously, like quantum virtual particle do, but on a larger scale.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." — Stephen Hawking in "The Grand Design".

I'm not qualified to say what a negative curvature might do to that pretty spontaneous-creation picture. It's a nice model, and it offers an answer to the question "where did all this come from?"
>Gaming is one of the last legitimate refuges of Windows dominance.

What about pretty much all larger businesses in the world? Windows sure dominate the corporate space.