skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To successfully replace the office suite, in the beginning you must be able to interact with office files.

Joel Spolsky (member of the office development team) attributed their success to this:

> Microsoft Office ended up beating its competitors because it was able to read and write to file formats other than its own. For example, Excel was able to read files from Lotus, and was able to save the file without losing any information. The important lesson in order to gain market share was that in order for new users to try Microsoft Excel, they had to be able to work with the files their coworkers were creating.

> Lesson: You don’t want your customers to feel locked into using your software. It helps with sales cycles because customers know that they can switch away if they so choose. While customers will be willing to try your product, they think two steps ahead. They want to ensure they can easily migrate to a new system.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/07/spolsky-on-sof...
Nice piece; unfortunately it's not just about MS Word. It's pretty common for inferior/hurtful-in-the-long-term products to get leading positions in the market and become "unavoidable". The first easy guess is that marketing people are doing a great job for these products; the second one would be that the majority of us are too stupid/busy/unwilling-to-consider-long-term-consequences to spot their game and go for smarter choices. TL;DR: Please run humanity.upgrade(), we would think about their word processors l8r (:
Who knows how many charge cycles it has been through.
I came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things.

So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).
You said it seems clever. I explained that it is the opposite. Why did you feel the appropriate response to that information was a random crazy rant about how old and cranky you are? If the idea of learning something offends you then don't learn, that's fine. But don't pitch a fit when someone corrects a misconception you are repeating.
Its easy to interpret it that way when do not read the comment.
What difference does it make if I'm famous and +1 something or write a review online about something because I have an opinion? What's the difference between choosing to +1 something and writing an unsponsored tweet or blog post? Why is it okay to write a review on Yelp (and have them profit from it) but not +1 something?

I appreciate other people can make money from my reviews and endorsements and really I have no problem with that because in theory I get value in return by way of my friends' recommendations. 9/10 it's the reviews that make or break my decision to buy something or go somewhere, and I give as freely as I receive even in the knowledge that some third party is profiting too.

Nobody's up in arms about Amazon or GoodReads profiting from reviews on their site. I don't see why this is any different.
Again, AbiWord and Libre Office are free.

You both got it wrong. It's not about size. Not about cost. It's about compatibility. People use word because their boss, publisher, or professor uses word. Because an entire ecosystem of office software integrates in word. Because kids taking a computer class in school learn Word commands, and nothing else. Because a perfectly styled document in LibreOffice doesn't always look right in Word.

More than 20 years later, Microsoft still survives off the popularity of DOS on IBM compatible pc's in the late 80s and early 90s. Their strategy since has been to further entrench themselves into our daily lives.
How did someone "expose the PHP source code"? Did they actually find a way to make the code show up client-side, or was it just someone who managed to get access to the backend stuff? The way it's worded makes it sound like the former, but that seems unlikely...
> I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting.

Use the keyboard if you want to highlight character-by-character.

Word is simply optimizing for the most-common case: copying-and-pasting whole words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's a lot faster when you don't have to hit the exact character boundary of the word -- especially if you're using a touchpad instead of a mouse.
Ok, so let's go with your assessment, that life-long slackers are indeed quite few. What happens when being a life-long slacker becomes acceptable in the culture (or as it might start out, in some subculture)? If slacking makes its way into culture, and becomes more accessible, isn't that potentially quite a big threat to the prosperity of future generations?
Out of curiosity, what are the comparisons to the closed-source driver under Kernel 3.12? The scant bits of info I can find -- a comparison to the windows catalyst driver -- seem to suggest that the open source driver is still a good deal slower ( http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1307253-SO-LEGACYAMD15#sy... ). Additionally, Steam's been available for Linux for years now, what's the framerate like on games that aren't Quake 3 derivatives?
> It's his company, and he can do what he wants.

Facebook is a publicly held company. Mark Zuckerberg has less than 30% of its shares.

> We created Zuckerberg ourselves by collectively choosing to use Facebook to regulate our social lives

And people will let it until they lose trust in Facebook or if an alternative comes along that serves their needs better. AOL, Friendster, and MySpace came before, they screwed up, and are insignificant now.
Mapping ㄱ/ㅋ/ㄲ to g/k is imperfect, and the single-double consonants are especially hard for non-Koreans to even hear the difference between as we simply don't make any distinction, but Koreans do.

Furthermore, the pronunciation on many consonants differs based on letter position in the word, medial pronunciation is markedly different that initial or final.

e.g. ㄹ might be pronounced d/l/r based on position.
You're much better off converting your latex--provided you don't have a bunch of kinky formatting--to docx via Pandoc.

I've found that collaboration on documents via Markdown is not too crazy bad. Otherwise, I ask for comments on the PDF or on hard copy. Going back to latex from RTF is an exercise in madness.
It's not any different.

I think you need to decide whether or not you want your opinions to be a product for somebody else to sell or not. If you're happy being a Google/Amazon/Facebook/Yelp drone, go for it.

Do you really need explicit endorsements from your friends in order to buy things? Or does getting them just make it easier for merchants to sell to you? Who is getting the benefit here?

I personally don't believe it's an even trade. Other opinions vary.
I always wondered where that came from, but I assumed it was on the backs of people paying interest on their balances.
If heroin was legal today would you go and try it? I wouldn't, and I suspect most people either would or would not regardless of the law.

For those that would, having to go but it from some non legitimate source where they are potentially exposed to non-pure product and potential crime certainly isn't going to help their situation.
You might not use it, but the websites you frequent and the people you socialize with will do so, and in some cases will be unable to live without it. You can try to escape, but you will still be within Zuckerberg's grasp, no matter how far you hide. He will hang over your life like a digitized sword of Damocles. Deep down, no matter what you tell yourself, you know you belong to him. His shadow will color every single thought you will ever conceive and every movement you will ever make.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Zuckerberg's boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Right. Another alternative is to call yourself Santa Claus and give it all away to other players during December.
Consider adding a Firewire 800 SATA enclosure. Then you can externally add an SSD or an HD for increased throughput (e.g. put the root on the internal drive, your home on the external one; or using OS X logical partitioning to combine both drives into a single volume)

Dont bother with a top of the line SSD, since the FW 800 can be saturated by mid-range SSDs.
Fun fact, you can already read it backwards. Try reading Hangul that's painted on a piece of glass from the wrong side. It's almost as easy as reading it written correctly.
Have you ever been involved in buying software for a company? In my experience, nobody compares the features of different word processing software. In fact, nobody even mentions competing software, as if Word was the only choice.
A lot of Hacker News superstars make that mistake. Rayiner makes it the most often. Of course he probably knows the difference, he's a really smart guy, but it's odd that he gets it wrong so often.

I used to look down upon people who would make these common mistakes... I don't anymore, after recently having been called out on making them myself. The human mind just makes these mistakes, I imagine because the sound link is very strong. The process of thinking of something and then writing it down is not instantaneous. When I've thought up a sentence, I will write it down without thinking much about it... it's then in that process of transcribing the thought to written text that the mistake is made. The only way to improve is to review your writings often, take note of what mistakes are most often occurring, and proactively watch for them in the future.
He didn't exaggerate? You and he must have awfully long tongues! Believe me, I've tried.

Fingering may or may not involve penetration. I can't make it any clearer without being explicit.

Or, maybe I have a reading comprehension problem.
I don't think you even need 'at-will'. Someone that is so blatantly not doing their job that they're not even showing up to work should be trivial to fire under almost any circumstances. ahomescu1's worry is pretty unrealistic.
All companies, in every nation, pay the minimum they can get away with. In nations with no social structure, very little wealth, and no jobs the choice is not government hand out vs minimum wage, but a very low paying job or starvation. It would appear you would rather these children starve then to allow them to work for enough money to feed themsleves, possibly working up and out of poverty over generations.

America did not just magically start out as a wealthy nation, for generations children labored on family farms, in business, and even in sweatshops. Generations ago a person had to work form dawn to dusk just to feed themselves, Today in America "poverty" is not having and iPhone or Broadband internet.

The idea that we can magically transform these 3rd world nation into 1st world nations is naive at best, The same path America took, is the same path these nations must take. Over time wages will increase, conditions will improve, etc, this is a natural order of things. The good news is, this will happen MUCH MUST faster than it did in America.

Check out these Videos

http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/top-3-ways-sweatshops-hel...

http://www.learnliberty.org/content/unbelievable-truth-about...

http://www.learnliberty.org/content/sweatshop-wages-and-thir...
Philip Glass is for me the best writer on software development from a almost-academic-research point of view (#). In facts and fallacies He bangs on a lot about complexity (25% increase in code, 100% increase in complexity) and opportunity cost. Brooks touches on this in the mythical man month.

What I am saying is that this is a good blog post, but this is stuff we should all know, all push to the PM and CEO with the morning mail, not have to be reminded of.

Just if we have to relearn this every year, let alone every generation, what are we missing ?

(#) really we have terrible software engineering research in the real world.
I don't remember from the site at the time what "monetization_box.php" would have been doing.

Also, my style of comments seem so tame and lame now :)
Courts are part of governments.
It is certainly not still there given that facebook doesn't run PHP any more. They wrote a compiler to translate a subset of PHP to C++, which they then compiled into a massive executable. The compiler is open source and called hiphop, and it does not implement the PHP memory limits.
> However much it cost Microsoft to build Excel.

More than that, because you have to replicate a lot of Excel's idiosyncracies in order to get compatibility. That's a very challenging task.

When Microsoft was putting Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility into Excel back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, this was a much smaller task than replicating Excel would be today. Lotus 1-2-3 was a much less complex product. Most people were upgrading from 1-2-3 v2.x to Excel, which meant that Excel really only had to be compatible with a product that was originally hand-written in x86 assembly.
> I guess we'll never obtain a perfect alternative to the mouse.

Is that really what they're going for?

I don't think you should view the Steam Controller as the controller to end all controllers. From that point of view, I'm sure it will fail, and people will be disappointed.

Instead, it's a controller that makes PC games playable from the couch. It won't be quite as good as a mouse and keyboard for games that were designed around those. It probably won't be quite as good as a standard console controller for games that were designed around those (you don't have the physical buttons to roll your fingers over to hit particular combos quickly). But it should make both types of games playable on a single controller.

And once it's out, who knows. Maybe people will be able to design games specifically for this type of controller, and there will be some games that are best played on it.
It's weird... a lot of the stuff around this talks about Borges' story but it's a total misinterpretation. He was talking about memetics and the need for us to bring our fictions into reality through drastic means that blend it with our history.

This is different. Also, can anyone tell if J.P. Harding posted his/her translation anywhere? http://www.codexseraphinianus.org/
Corruption causes a disproportionate wealth disparity, it's one of the methods used to detect it. Works especially well within a country to identify more or less corrupt states. One argument is corruptions leads to reduced actual investment in infrastructure, roads, schools, things which increase a regions wealth, making corrupt areas show up pretty clearly on a map.
Sounds like it was an "accident". The web server served up the source code rather than compiling the PHP, which someone then saved.
The hidden cost of early optimization can be hidden complexity and bugs. Take something slow and simple, replace with a cute trick that complicates and has corner cases and boom maintenance nightmare. In many cases while the optimization is obvious, it is unnecessary since no cold hard data on the cost of execution in production of the slow code actually exists
Mecanismul de aplicare a sistemului TVA la incasare
dapmedia.ro
Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about the Irish
It's possible to sympathise with both of their mixed up lives.

Do you always ask your partner if you can kiss or have sex with them?
I find it interesting you get that from my comments. Personally, I blame myself (entirely) for the choices I made that ended with me in some very bad situations. Not the drugs. They're an outlet and a symptom; rarely are they the cause, in my opinion.
He's still pretty much the decision maker though.

And anyway, I've always thought that the title 'publicly held company' is a bit of a misnomer. The word 'public' (to some people) almost implies a connotation of public interest and true public ownership... when the reality of it is actually the opposite in a lot of cases.
Facturile se platesc obligatoriu in 30 de zile Contractele se modifica
dapmedia.ro
Great point! Re-reading what we write is great advice. I have found several mistakes by reading my own pull requests before I submit them, even.
Not percentile. 45% of mean.
It's not just information that inhibits the poor.

The poor struggle. Daily.

In that struggle a truth emerges: Struggle is all you've known, it's what you knew yesterday and it is what you will know tomorrow.

For the poor struggle, hardship and despair dull the senses and the reality of the present stretches out before them. There is no future, there is just more of the present forever and ever.

What I feel those with privilege cannot comprehend is that words like aspiration, phrases like social mobility, are so alien that they are meaningless. If you're aware enough to have been angry, you're probably also aware enough to realise the stupidity of throwing yourself against the tide of the world. And so you accept and endure.

You can provide information but without hope and belief that change is possible to their lives, and that the struggle can be overcome, information is worthless. Food and shelter for a day are the only things you can offer of value.
Aside from the fact he was married, drunk and her boss...

The problem with not getting explicit consent is that the other party may not be comfortable with your advances. If you misinterpret the signals, well, I'm sorry - that's your issue, not the other parties. If you mix up the signals as you haven't communicated sufficiently with the other party, then I'm afraid you are still responsible for your actions.

Personally, I've never been bold enough to be so forthright to a woman. Now I'm married, I'm glad I never was! This sort of situation seems to me to be an absolute minefield and you are highly at risk of getting it wrong!

I honestly feel no sympathy for this Joe fellow. He should never have placed himself in this situation, and he should never have attempted the things he did until he had the chance to properly know whether he got consent or not. You are NOT going to find that out clearly at a rowdy bar surrounded by colleagues and party-goers.
Understood, but as a publicly held company, anyone with enough money can swoop in and buy enough shares to get a seat at the table, whether Zuckerberg likes it or not (people like Carl Icahn come to mind).
I have absolutely no problem with this:

* Google provides me with a very valuable service that simplifies my life (I profit)
* my friends recommend things they've loved which makes my life better (I profit)
* businesses that are good and recommended also profit (great! I love seeing good people succeed)
my friends profit when I recommend stuff
Google profits as a result of being value (also good -- they get to stay in business)

I have absolutely no problem with businesses and other people making money. I'm quite surprised that on a site mainly for entrepreneurs that there'd be such a backlash against a feature that benefits everybody involved.

I don't need explicit endorsements to buy something, but I highly value them. For example, I buy from Amazon because of the reviews. These reviews reduce risk of disappointment, and this is one of their USPs because they do it so well. Granted, not everything that's highly rated turns out to be to my liking but I'm dissatisfied far less frequently with my purchases.
I'd s/therefore/but/ in the second case.
As someone who's spent his life roughly equally split across Bangladesh and America, I thought I'd provide some perspective.

The questions I ask myself about this situation are:

1. Are the lives of the people who work in these factories better or worse as a result of these jobs existing?

The answer I end up arriving at repeatedly is that it is a resounding improvement in the lives of almost everyone. RMG factories empower women to provide for themselves in a way that nothing else in the country can. There simply aren't any other jobs for women in low-income brackets in Bangladesh and I personally know individuals who found the courage to break themselves out of abusive marriages and the ability to say no to marriages they didn't want because of the income they have from these jobs.

2. Could the factories be better?

Yes, absolutely. Most of the owners could obviously afford to pay employees better given the incredible amounts of wealth that the factory owners have accumulated and having gone to school with some of their children, I know quite a few factory owners personally. The reason they don't pay more comes down to simply business principles. The objective of a labor intensive business is to drive costs down the lowest possible amount legally. That is what they do.

3. What is the government's role?

This is pretty simple. They should raise the minimum wage for factory workers, create more stringent regulation and make great effort to ensure those regulations are followed. This is where invalidOrTaken's point about corruption comes in. Many of the factory owners are themselves members of parliament, or have spent a great deal of money getting one of their lackeys elected. On top of that, virtually everyone in a regulatory agency will take massive bribes to look the other way.

When the article talks about that girl's dream being a sewing operator, and you cringe because that sounds so depressing, realize that 10 years ago this girls only option would have been to get married to a rickshaw puller or shopkeeper and hope he wasn't abusive. Today, she can dream of a job, of moving up a ladder and maybe even becoming a manager some day. That's progress even if it comes with a whole host of issues.
> I had two points there - the first was that pearjuice was plain wrong. The second was that pearjuice's attitude does not belong in civilised society and that anybody holding such an attitude should be defenestrated with extreme prejudice.

I agree with you completely on that point. People like pearjuice do not belong in our civilised society. Seeing pearjuice victim blame is disgusting, and he should be taught a lesson in humility and empathy.

I suggest we make him sew a yellow pear on his clothes, and send him to a empathy training camp.
>"That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.
That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?"

Abiword's grammar checker is not nearly as good as Word's. That is specially in non-english laguanges. Also I would add to that list all the templates and design that Word brings out-of-box.

I am a weird case because I use Abiword at work and Office at home. And at least for short documents (10 pages max.) the experience on Word is just more enjoyable to me.
> If you want to say what she did is problematic then you have to argue that she is lying. Plain and simple. Do you do that?

Can we stop having these black or white discussions?

After more then half a year, there is no such thing as the truth. Even if the whole thing was on tape we cannot piece together what was going on in their heads at the time.

It seems that every time some case of harassment hits the news people partaking in the discussion are either branded as blaming the victim or branded as destroying someone's life by defaming the accused. Can't we find some middle ground?

As dissatisfying as it may be, by the very nature of the topic there will never be the one truth to the story, but at least as many views as people were there during the event. We need to find a way to accept this ambiguity lest we will never stop shouting at each other.
If this is indeed the law, its scary. I for one take some Time to realize that someone is not into it. In fact I always put in extra effort to put someone in the mood if they are feeling frigid. I thought this is normal male behavior - a little bit of persistence. I see this in movies all the time. Maybe we need to mark most of the american movies as R.
You have a reading comprehension problem. I'd suggest you stop digging that hole any deeper.