skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Abandoning APIs to me is a sign of bad management, and that's what I really can't stand any more. I have spent my career building apps side by side for OS X and Windows and I just can't stomach Windows any more. The thing is, unless you're really lucky, you probably have worked at a few places that had really bad management. I know I have. When you get the same vibe from the company that manages your IDE and complete computing (operating system) experience it's a terrible feeling. Take Metro for example. I can't stand the thought of developing for it because I have this sinking feeling that in 2 years Microsoft will have to abandon it and I will have wasted hours of my life that I can never get back. Conversely, take Objective-C. I have been greatly rewarded for taking the time to learn that. Something tells me that isn't going anywhere. Granted, any company will have some misses and drop things, but Microsoft it's like loading the barrel of a gun with 5 bullets and putting it to your head.

Disclaimer: This is opinionated commentary partially describing the bad feelings that I actually feel towards Microsoft after all these years. They are more emotional and less factual, but I think the fact that I arrived here associating these bad feelings towards Microsoft shows what a deep hole they are in with developers.
Gold growing on trees offers a new prospecting tool
E-bikes are great.

One of the reasons they have taken off is the low price and cheap running cost.

This article says they can be bought for $1000. The price in China is more like $300-$400.

Most apartment building will charge 1 yuan a day to park/charge your bike. No tax/license/Insurance
Tweet7: An iOS 7 inspired Twitter app.
There are many countries where it is legal and regulated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_law#Prostitution_l...).
Paid apps vs shady business
You are conflating two completely different properties of MS Office: (1) product functionality (e.g. macros) and ecosystem, and (2) proprietary file format lockin.

I'm objecting to the latter, when it is a virtual monopoly, and I'm suggesting that the vast majority of Office sales are for the latter reason, not the former.
Video of the researchers explaining how this happens and how the gold can be detected: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-t...
Further to the article, and before you chop down trees to obtain the gold, the concentrations of gold mentioned equate to 500 trees containing enough gold to make a wedding ring [1]. Also links to CSIRO's media release [2] and the paper [3].

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-t...

[2] http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Gilding-the-gum-tree-scien...

[3] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/nco...
I am not optimistic this will succeed. Reasoning about programs is much harder than, say, driving a car. (Consider the number of humans who can do each competently.)

I am glad to see DARPA taking an interest in this problem, but I think they need to take a longer view. Fundamental breakthroughs are needed; it's not just a matter of gluing together existing technologies.

Full disclosure: I work for HP Fortify, one of the existing businesses that would certainly be negatively impacted by a technology such as DARPA describes here.
Another reason for being wary of Microsoft:

Their OSes and applications have an auto-run policy (run stuff automatically when a CD is inserted, or scripts in Excel, etc). It is clearly a way to allow viruses into the system, and then make some money from updates and anti-viruses!
Betting on profits of the agent conditional on various code changes. "Agent profits will increase X% by date Y, given code change Z." If code change Z isn't chosen, money is refunded to the people who bet in the market. If it is chosen, then it stays open until date Y, where it pays off depending on the eventual profits.
Define rarely? What about Webkit, LLVM, and CUPS?
Meta HN question - why was the submitted link deleted?
This story... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/21/practice-fusion-patient-privacy-explicit-reviews/
...was submitted and started a good conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6594352 , but the link was deleted without explanation and now the story isn't discoverable or searchable. Why?
I may be understanding the laws wrong, but I believe that he wasn't prosecuted for copyright law because copyright law mainly deals with redistribution, not personal use. Even the DMCA in its worst interpretation only disallows circumventing DRM to make a copy for personal use; making a copy for personal use by itself has never been covered by copyright law. Since he wasn't planning to redistribute the code he copied, he wasn't affected by copyright law.
This is coming out and saying that.
Django 1.6 Release Candidate (release notes)
I am willing to bet that in the vast majority of cases (in the US), it is exploitative to women. Women who stand on street corners and sell themselves are usually not doing it because they think of themselves as liberated. They do it because they need to make ends meet, and because if they don't, they will get in trouble with their boss. When people on HN think about prostitution, they think of escorts, not $50 hookers (or women who don't even get paid).
Microsoft makes substandard products and price discriminates heavily.
I'm biased because I wrote it myself, but our Mac.AppStorm review is 1/3rd the length and mostly focuses on what's new in the OS: http://mac.appstorm.net/reviews/os-x-reviews/everything-you-...
Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics
That's because Bender's metal ass is so shiny.
It shouldn't really matter, considering FirePro cards are just 7970s with a different firmware and driver set. The silicon is identical.
It does not happen as an isolated event. You're oversimplifying.
...

HAHAHAHA!!!
> Has it occurred to people to like, take a step back for a moment and think about how amazing it is that we as a society have advanced to the point where we can even have something like iPad? We're all trying to make people's lives better with computers, and Apple is as much a part of this mission as any of the people on this site.

Anyone who bleeds in six colors is quietly celebrating the achievements in this new launch; enriching and delighting lives with technology is exactly what they've always believed in.
Ah, it all makes sense now. For about a dollar a line, I wouldn't give a shit either.
Deary, if only someone organized and cataloged the worlds information.
>OK, I didn't accuse you but I did accuse another poster of being an MS shill. I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. Still, as I recall, the person I accused was a professional "evangelist" (or something similar) for MS by their own admission writing an article about, what do you know, hatred of MS.

Sounds like an interesting thread, care to link to it? I have been an avid HN reader, but I don't remember seeing a thread like this and suspect it may not exist.
Microsoft vs Apple vs Google vs ??? ... It's all the same, religion by any other name. They've all done things that aren't exactly in the best interest of the users of their systems... and sometimes act against even their own best interest.

As a recently added employee at GoDaddy, not by acquisition, I was a bit surprised by the visceral hate coming from the buyout of Media Temple.. my understanding is that MT will operate as a separate unit, and a lot of its' practices are moving into GoDaddy. I had a lot of anxiety at first, and sometimes still do. It's a culture that is dramatically and rapidly changing, but it does take time.

I've known plenty of people who work for MS over the years who are pretty bright, and do good work. I happen to be one of those people who like .Net (C# in particular), and can appreciate a lot of the very thoughtful decisions that have been made. On the flip side, I feel that the brand affiliation between products, while keeping windows alive for a long time, at the expense of potentially greater revenues (Office for iOS/Android), has hurt them a lot.

I've been spending roughly half my server-side dev time in node.js, and recently even more than that. I feel that docker.io + LXC + node.js is an incredible combination that MS doesn't match. I think that WebStorm is good enough, and VS is really getting a bit bloated and slow (plugins make it more effective, but more bloated and slow).

Who knows where things may go, I don't always choose MS, but I don't hate them. I currently have my HTPC running Linux+XBMC, my desktop at home and work are Windows (with VMWare for some linux work), and my laptop is a Mac. I use what I feel is best for a given task.

/$.02 + inflation
Looks like pretty clean handmade CSS.

I don't see any magic here. Modern CSS3 lets you build arbitrary geometry with arbitrary animations if you're crazy enough.

What I do see here is an excellent grasp of Cartesian geometry and some serious dedication. Which I suppose is no less magical.
It's kind of hilarious to see a Merovingian quote here, but I agree that the ridiculous "we're people, not animals" argument can't be disparaged enough. A limited but very significant example of this is the fact that the vast majority of money made on mobile apps and games depends on behavioral conditioning. You know... ring the bell, dog salivates? We've been doing this for decades -- just look at my Final Fantasy collection -- but only now is it really juicing us for cash at optimal levels. And it's not because we're Impressively Sophisticated.
How To Install GTA V on Notebook
I don't understand what's wrong with this. Of course it is crude and the creator comments are offensive. But the creator does not sugar-coat the product in any way. He clearly says its a dating app to bribe woman. He's calling a spade, a spade. And I am sure there will be enough men who want to use this to get dates. If you don't like the idea, don't use it. Why bash the creator. Let the idea die because of lack of attention.
Eutopia
That's really cool. Do you know what tool was used to build that? I know a few clients that would love this.
>> When I hire designers, I look for future perfect people. Some people have the potential, but they haven’t had the opportunities. Their portfolios are full of mediocre work, but it’s not because they’re mediocre designers. It’s because they’ve been given mediocre opportunities.

How? How do you figure out someone is "future perfect" and not mediocre? If things were that easy, wouldn't all of us be hiring "future perfect" people anyway?
It's kinda sad that while the US seems to be more and more open to the idea of legalised marihuana, here in the Netherlands we are slowly moving in the opposite direction. This might also have something to do with the EU: for example Franch citizens sometimes travel to the Netherlands to buy hash or weed. France doesn't like this, so recently our so-called coffee-shops[0] have been required to ask for identification and it's not allowed to sell hash & weed to foreigners. So what happens now is the weed is being sold on the streets buy Dutch citizens to foreigners - the new laws actually caused an increase in criminal activity.

Actually our laws are rather weird: a coffee-shop may sell hash or weed, but may not buy it - we still allow them to buy it, but I guess it has to be from some illegal sources since in the Netherlands we are allowed to grow a few plants for private consumption only.

Also, several years ago a French girl committed suicide in Amsterdam while under the influence of magic mushrooms[1]. Because of these kinds of incidents with foreigners magic mushrooms became illegal. There is still a legal alternative of course, "magic truffles", but it's saddening to see these kinds of changes in my country.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_coffee_shop

[1]: http://www.simplyamsterdam.nl/news/French_tourist_in_Amsterd...
But how much of that is because there is no legal recourse when a prostitute is defrauded? One of the reasons for pimps is to provide protection where the law won't.
Binary Operator Joke
It would be a risky strategy because those commenters could get banned.
So, by extension, the vast majority of Photoshop sales are due to PSD lock-in? And the vast majority of Apple sales are due to iOS lock-in?

I'm seeking a distinction here. If my statements about Adobe and Apple are not true, what makes Microsoft different?
At the point that I was trying to solve this problem (and not getting paid as a result) I was unable to find anyone who had successfully gotten SL to run in a VMWare VM or Lion to run in a SL VM. Interestingly, I did find individuals who had Lion running in Lion VMs, but that didn't help me get back up and running.

Edited to add: You are correct, the technical restriction was on the VMWare side, but IIRC it was because of legal threats from Apple. Apparently earlier versions of VMWare would run SL without any problems, but the VMWare version I had would not not and I couldn't get a copy of the older version.
I think that's cheating.
I'm assuming "bare" means without drives.

The cheapest 2TB drive I'd be willing to buy is this one [1]. Disregarding the "NAS Drive!!!" marketing junk, if you sort disk drives by price on Newegg this is the first one with a 5 star rating from 31 reviews.

You could go cheaper and get a 3 star rating'd drive for $85 [2].

To fill your chassis with the Seagate: 1x$1499 plus 8x$119 = $2451

To fill your chassis with the Toshiba: 1x$1499 plus 8x$85 = $2179

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178...

[2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149...
That's a good point, but there's no question here of police going on a fishing expedition. By definition, an invalid warrant is subject to the good faith exception because it's reasonable. Here, there doesn't seem to be any question about the defendant being in possession of the information they're alleged to have taken.

I find nothing unreasonable about the warrant here.
Darpa Project Is About Thinking Computers
Previous Discussion (6 months ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5545378

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542368
I'd forgotten that, but yes, I seem to remember reading that. Unfortunately I didn't have the server version and was already loosing money because of my down time, so I needed to get up and running with a known good system as soon as I could.
Wrong; every time it happens, it happens as an isolated event. That it happens frequently is the only thing that makes people decide it should be viewed and regulated on a higher level.

The only reason prostitution is outlawed in certain places is because those places have accepted as part of their governance certain values specific to sex and its relation to commerce.
I was disappointed that the Nokia thread was nuked. I was interested to see HN's take on it. Instead it ended with a silly flamewars about astroturfing and we ended up with half a dozen articles about OS X and the iPad on the home page.
"According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code."

I call bullshit. Facebook is 62 million KLOC on the main site, excluding the backend. And I'll argue that Facebook is one of the most complicated sites out there, feature-wise.

I wonder if this is actually combining all 50 states' health exchanges (and their third-party insurance API connectors), which MIGHT make sense, given an average of 10 million lines per state site.
That's why in many of the countries where prostitution is legal, pimping is still illegal.

On the other hand, the results of at least one study suggest that prostitutes who work with pimps earn more, work less hours and have lower rates of injury.

Extreme Prelimary Study here:
http://economics.uchicago.edu/pdf/Prostitution%205.pdf

Note, for better or for worse, one of the authors is associated with "freakaonimcs."
Awesome Twitter tools for business
Sure, whole classes of problems will disappear as old people die.

But we may not need to wait for grannie and her bridge club to die for this one; TFA notes that support for full-blown legal weed is up 14% in people over 65 since 2011.
What a curious example of symbiosis. Guy trolls journalists with a deliberately controversial app, knowing he can count on their indignation to make them write about how awful it is and thus send him lots of traffic. And then an "edgy" publication passes on the troll directly to us by defending it, thereby getting attention for themselves as well.
Guess CSS is basically a Turing complete language.
Ask HN: Does being good at TopCoder etc help you with day to day work?
Hey HN,

This question has lingering in my mind for quite a while now. Is being good at TopCoder, Codeforces etc (algorithms/data structure/problem solving) useful in day to day work?

I am aware that it helps you clear most of the tech interviews but I am not sure if it helps out more in daily work compare to reading a book (Like PAIP), reading source code of a project you use on daily basis or taking a challenging course on Coursera/Udacity (Like programming languages).

So any thoughts from fellow HNers?
Just to note it's priceusa.com.au .
To clarify some of the discussion, there are two separate regulatory regimes at play here.

Navigable airspace is regulated by the FAA and the FAA has recently begun to enforce its rules for UAS or drones (see tensafefrogs's comment). The FAA's view is that the difference between RC and a UAS/drone is whether the operator gets paid. They mostly ignore the RC community.

Then there is a state/local regulation of reckless behavior in general. This is not related to flying, per se. It is related to endangering others.

The pattern of prosecution is the feds going after operators who are getting paid for violating the rules for aircraft (any aircraft piloted or not must maintain separation from buildings, etc.) and the state/local authorities going after RC operators who endanger others through recklessness.

All in all, it seems like we're moving towards a rational system where RC operators can play in safe spaces and eventually we'll have licensing and regulation of commercial operators to work in more challenging environments.
Likewise, doesn't work in FF24 on Windows either, nor in IE10.

I am wondering if this works in anything aside from Webkit based browsers.
> i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. [...] That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.

If you look back on times that people have complained about Microsoft posts being persecuted by flagging rings, you will (as far as I can see) without fail find a flamewar.

I don't mean to gloat, but I've been pointing this out for months. It is nice to be vindicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5759369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030087
It is a custom drawing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542742
It's probably combining the lines of generated HTML of every possible page permutation of the site.
These new lower end E5 16xxs are essentially Core i7s and priced about equivalently[1]. The 26xx's are much beefier (I think people were expecting 26xx's across the line but matching specs[2], this is obviously not the case).

I'd be pleasantly surprised if the 12C Mac Pro sold for less than $6K but as you can see the big ($1500!) bump is between the 6C/8C and they didn't talk pricing beyond the 6C so if they don't eat the cost you're looking at a $6K 8C and a $7K/$8K 12C.

4C exact match:
$294 Xeon E5-1620 v2 4C 3.7GHz/3.9GHz 10MB L3 130W TDP

6C exact match:
$583 Xeon E5-1650 v2 6C 3.5GHz/3.9GHz 12MB L3 130W TDP

8C closest match (underclocked?):
$2057 Xeon E5-2667 v2 8C 3.3GHz/4GHz 25MB L3 130W TDP

12C exact match:
$2614 Xeon E5-2697 v2 12C 2.7GHz/3.5 GHz 30MB L3 130W TDP

Tom's Hardware did some superficial (mostly desktop workload) testing on the E5-2697 v2 a couple months ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-ep-xeon-e5-26...

[1] http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/2013091401_Intel_Xeon_E5-...

[2] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ and the description text: "Intel Xeon E5 with 10MB L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. Configurable to 3.5GHz 6-core processor with 12MB L3 cache, 3.0GHz 8-core processor with 25MB L3 cache, or 2.7GHz 12-core processor with 30MB L3 cache"
Apple maintains many of the same positions, yet they are loved.

There are more than a handful of us who despise Apple, and for mostly the same reasons we despise Microsoft. They pimp their closed-source, proprietary, locked-down bullshit, and it's "walled garden", closed-off ecosystem just like MS pimp theirs. I have no use for either of them.

Note: written using Chrome on Fedora Linux.
This is exactly why we need legalization, transparency, regulation, and probably unionization. All those things tend to suppress the exploitative side.
Your willingness to bet on this just does not help anyone. Are you on that corner? Is that your family? Do you understand, in a visceral sense, the options these people do or don't have, and does your moral indignation give more credence to your point of view than to the people who actually do this, and more perspective on their lives?

And thanks for letting us know what we are discussing when we talk about prostitution. I hope we're not all as ignorant as you think we are, because many of us almost certainly know what actual prostitution is, how seedy it can be, and that "escorts" -- to which you ascribe some ridiculous notion of universal high-brow status -- is what we think of, while you're wisely pondering the true nature of the sex trade.

Sorry, this is just really, really presumptuous, and I have a hard time reading it.
Hence, why we need MIRI http://intelligence.org/
People in tech, including those on HN, are often prone to hyperbole (myself included).

I've got a bunch of example topics: MS, the NSA, F/OSS, Google & privacy, CISPA, etc.

In each of these cases, there's usually some voices of reason (grellas, anigbrowl, tptacek, masklinn, gruseom, I'm looking at you) and a lot of people who treat the story as life and death.

CISPA is the END of net neutrality. Google is the END of privacy on the internet. F/OSS is about what's RIGHT and what's WRONG and F/OSS is RIGHT and proprietary software is WRONG. MS SecureBoot isn't about addressing a well-studied security problem by Microsoft and the security industry, it's about PUTTING DOWN the Linux desktop. The NSA is the END OF ALL PRIVACY.

I'm not sure what the reason is but people just overreact.

So here's my take on MS. It's a software company. Use their stuff, don't use their stuff: whatever. The days when it was THE software company are over. If we don't ship you a compelling experience, use something else.
Unfortunately Bandcamp's embed doesn't seem to be working in Firefox/liveweave for me, but here's a theme song added:

http://liveweave.com/bhu7HB
Oh, clever you.
This is PG. If he doesn't think it is just a bunch of well-meaning commenters coincidentally behind the same NAT, then I am inclined to believe him.

Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. I think that is good policy, unless participating in those discussions is part of your job description. Best case scenario here: a bunch of well-meaning Microsoft employees got into an internet fight, got mistaken for a sockpuppet ring, and got a discussion about their company pushed off of HN? If that's in their job description, I don't know why they're still getting paid; if it isn't, maybe they should consider spectating next time.
https://coinbase.com/security
But won't the OpenCL implementation allow you to use all that GPU hardware to benefit the non-graphics tasks as well?

I have a feeling this computer is going to be much faster than people expect.
That 323 million lines of code for Debian 5.0 also counts all the packages included with debian. The debian codebase by itself is only 68 million lines of code: http://www.ohloh.net/p/debian
"According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code."

And you guys believe that so call "specialist" without any proof?...What happened to HN? :/