skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My Math teacher in College used to tell me it takes 5 times the effort to go from 70 to 100 marks, than it took to go from 0 to 70 marks. Finishing well is hard and often takes more than just raw application of hard work.

To get it really ~100% percent right, you need to not only work hard, or work more but you need to develop a strange obsession for quality. And that only comes from continual reading, and upgrading your skills. To constantly learn from experience and other people's wisdom and apply it to your daily craft.

Getting to the 80% done part, if you note you will be often working on stuff which is largely solved and rewritten many times. Things like working with DB or a file, or parsing an XML- Basically stuff like that is what constitutes first 80% of the project. The remaining 20% is what your actual project is, its functional requirements, its quality and other stuff like that.

This is not just with software, building a home is very similar. It takes very little time to build the frame structure(walls, foundation, roof etc)- A lot more time to actually finish the home which is livable.

For that you can only do it right if you go slow but steady.

Remember you either go far or fast, never both. You will have the stamina or strength to only do one of them.
So, for everyone who feels that they have anything resembling a better solution, I'd suggest that you go and actually try implementing it at a smaller scale first. Start with your homeowners' association, your neighborhood, or your nearest town. You'll have relatively few people to convince, more access to decision makers and funding sources, and less capable contractors gaming your system.

Get that down, and then get several neighboring communities--again, HOAs, neighborhoods, or towns--and get them to adopt your ideas as well. With that amount of variation, you've got a strong base from which you can convince a major city, or a county, to adopt your ideas: after all, many of their constituents are already on it and can endorse it.

This isn't meaningfully different from founding a startup taking on governments as clients.
I thought it's by design :)

Reminded me the undead break dance from the inXile's Bard's Tale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP_7nFldRtY
I hate when people do that, 'I had to mess with some shitty code and it was made in X, therefore all of X is shitty'

Crappy work can be done in any language/framework
Amazon very carefully tracks the profitability of each SKU they sell. If they're selling it to you, they've figured out how to do it profitably. Consider that you'd pay a similar price for it in a retail store, where it had to be handled multiple times, stocked on a shelf, subject to theft and loss, etc. - there's enough margin to cover that, so if Amazon can drop it in a box and ship it to you for less, they can make money on it.
Pirate Bay Founder Urges Sweden to Stop His Extradition
Not to mention nowadays if your in music industry (radio at least) you are pulling XP machines outta the trash.
Which part did you feel was talking down to you? I need to know in order to improve my own writing.
Anyone noticed the smiley? Still, not protecting user passwords with a master-key makes it way too easy to read them. B2T now.
It's not like they're more powerful than other laptops.
I don't understand your argument... The popular standards in all proprietary formats exert a "tax" on businesses and consumers in the context you describe. Witness Adobe with Photoshop and Flash, Apple with iOS devices, etc. Yet people pay the $240/year for the Photoshop license instead of a one-time $30 for Paint Shop Pro (or free for GIMP). It's not a conspiracy - everyone else using the same ecosystem as you has external benefits and that's why people buy in.

It's not just that Excel is powerful (and it is...). It's that as a user, I have access to all the pre-made macros and VBA tools from an army of other users. I have the availability of help from a plethora of well-staffed volunteer forums. I have the ability to natively open any XLS, XLSX, XLSM, and XLSB file that a colleague or customer sends me.

I think it is unwise to underestimate the power and privileges gained by working in the dominant ecosystem. People don't part with their money that blindly or lightly - it is the easy choice to go with the herd on many of these decisions rather than paving your own road with a (relatively) un-tested marginal player.
I don't love Apple for some of the same reasons I don't love Microsoft.
I think that maintaining a community like this is really a dynamic process, so while it's important to make note of bad incentive situations for the future, it's not necessarily the best choice to correct them prematurely. In theory, your reasoning sounds right. In practice, that's probably not happening right now, so the mechanism still serves its purpose with only the (presumably considered acceptable) expected collateral damage.

The important thing with a situation like that is to be ready to kill the feature as soon as people learn how to exploit it. It's one thing to see that it's theoretically exploitable. It's another to actually figure out how to selectively engineer flame wars to make a significant dent in the front page.
This is really neat. I'm really interested in seeing how all these new fancy CSS3/HTML5 features shape the evolution of casual online games. Back in the day it was either static images, like the Neopets sort of thing (which are still pretty common with young kids I think - Webkinz is a cash cow and that site looks straight out of my childhood), or slow awful Flash games that usually didn't have any data persistence. Even if this Bender example is kind of hacky as other comments are indicating, the possibilities still seem pretty limitless.
Well I dont hate them. I actually always admired MS. When I was a kid, Windows 3.1 just amazed me.

And I continued to be a fan. But then one day I realized GMail was so much better than hotmail. So much free space! No more deleting! Hotmail refused to change, so I switched over. Then one day I realized that linux was such a great place for me to learn how to program. So I picked it up.

With time I tried other products and, one by one, I realized there were alternatives I prefer to MS's offerings. Today I bought my first Macbook. My first non windows machine. I dont plan on purchasing any more Office licenses. And for the first time in a while, I see no MS products on the horizon for me. Not the XBox One. Not Windows 8 mobile. Not surface pro. Nothing.

Why? I prefer their competitors products. Its not MS hate. They just dont have a single product that exites me. Nothing.

Now if you asked me about Windows 8 UI, I would tell you that I think its an abomination. That might look like MS hate.

If you asked me about the Surface, I would tell you I hate how it tries to do so much and fails to lead in just about anything. If you ask me about IE, I would tell you that I think Firefox and Chrome are better, although the new one seems crisp.

Nothing to do with the brand, all to do with the product.
I always find it really hard to understand this behavior as well, as a self confessed geek I really enjoy using all technology Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. I really dont understand how people can be the cheer squad for a corporate company, because they are all profit driven every single one of them is inherently evil. So we should look at what they all do an have discourse on the actions. To me HN is becoming like the console condition PS4 vs XBOXONE, the companies want you to be like this, any sensible person with critical thinking can see that everything is flawed and innovation is everywhere.

Being a fan or enemy of a company is stupid, you are just playing into consumerism. I hope every tablet company has success because competition is good for me.
They can't, because Bash 4 is GPLv3. Apple's lawyers will not allow any GPLv3 code out the door.
Do you it's time MS cut funding to do pure research and focus on research that'll lead to products instead? Like Google research does? There seems to be waay too much fluff in MSR too. I mean the number of techfest posters on campus showing off social (facebook, twitter data) related research was just ridiculous - I don't see that even remotely benefiting us in the near future.

Also, most of these researchers do not collaborate or are otherwise unaware of similar product projects going on in-house. For example, we have a ZooKeeper committer and contributer from MSR, yet we ended up building a distantly similar one in azure only to find out later that it existed (this was in it's early days).
There's one at http://viewdns.info/ if you're only after common ports.
Well its a bit of both. Goldman claimed at trial that the code uploaded could be used to manipulate the markets. If a python erlang bridge can be used to do that it is certainly a new one on me. So what he did was wrong. And Goldman was trying to send a message to people leaving. At the time people were leaving their HFT group and they wanted to do anything possible to stem that.

At best this should have been a civil lawsuit. The public almost certainly has no interest in what happened.
Well, I run Elementary on my laptop, OS X on my iMac, have an iPhone, a Nexus 7, and a BlackBerry Playbook (quite an underrated tablet for it's time). I'm a developer, and build apps for all of those devices.

And you know what? WPF _is_ nice. I _liked_ Silverlight (but am frustrated that it doesn't work under Linux, though not surprised). Microsoft make _good_ developer tools, in my personal humble opinion.

The problem I see are they still make a large amount of missteps, and don't engage the "tastemakers" of tech anymore. Any goodwill they once had has been squandered, and if you look at Yahoo! you can see that it's super difficult to get it back.

Now that Ballmer is leaving, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future -- will they get a CEO that isn't afraid to take big, bold risks? To cook the golden goose in the short-term, perhaps, to allow for growth into new markets?

Somehow I doubt it, but I wish they would.

Windows 8 has been really good to me; I've installed it (and Office 2013) on all the devices of my family and (ex)girlfriends, my ex has a Windows Phone on my recommendation. They all love it, and find it easier to use than anything in the past. Just today, I purchased a touch-screen HP All-In-One for my Grandfather, and he loves it (and is super excited about using the Kindle app while in his lean-back chair on the 22" screen, synced with his Kindle itself).

When I was working at Harvey Norman, I sold $15 000 worth of Surface and Surface Pros to customers in one month; They were easy to sell as long as you knew how to appeal to the consumers _actual_ needs. They didn't suit everyone, but for those that did no other Tablet came close.

Basically, they have more potential than nearly any other tech company out there. Something has been holding them back, and they've succeeded in spite of themselves. I hope that they can turn it around moving forward.
I couldn't believe the other day when I was playing GTA 5 and it said "You can now buy properties" and flashed a medical marijuana dispensary on the screen. I was stoked! Makes the world even more realistic.

In my home state, Michigan, if you drive around there are billboards for "The Best OG Kush" and "Grow The Best OG Kush" also signs for pot doctors everywhere! 2 certs for $100! Anyways, what I always tell people is stop reading the news and just go about your business. In my world, and the world of the people I am around marijuana is more than legal, it is accepted. I have made a lot of pro pot comments on HN as I sit here smoking a joint (totally legal btw, the doctor said I should keep using for the next 75 years!), this is the first time where I just feel like the pot people have won. It's harmless and people are actually accepting that. Now I just hope the police do.

Its going to be important for the US to figure out the marijuana. More states are legalizing for medical every year and it has caused havoc on local governments trying to figure out exactly what rules and laws are determined to mean. Better for states to step up and legalize it, but it is time.
It does make a lot of sense, actually, as you need to remember only one master key instead of multiple login-password combinations.
For an example of one modern JS game, see http://www.bombermine.com

I'm not aware of any games that use CSS3 for the ingame graphics, though.
I don't think anything matches macbook's solid aluminium body and build quality. After I've dumped my ubuntu laptop few years ago, I don't want to go back to all that plastic rubbish.

Not all laptops created equal, so yes, you can probably find decent hardware. It will inevitably be priced similarly or above the Mac alternatives. So no gain in HW department.

Now consider OS. I have to use win7 desktop at work, and have to maintain my wife's win7 laptop at home. Both are orders of magnitude worse than ubuntu or osx.

And any decently built laptop comes with Windows preinstalled and manufacturers rarely care about other platforms.
Good luck fiddling with the 3d graphics and wifi drivers.
I'm not saying it's impossible to set it up, and maybe it's much easier today than last time I've tried 2-3 years ago. Maybe it's not too bad.

But still, is it worth it?

And btw, please share your experience, if you try any of the alternatives suggested here.
I'd love to find a good alternative to my MBA. But for now I just don't see a point in trying.
It's not necessarily true. It's just idle / uninformed speculation with almost no insight into Amazon's internal operations or supporting facts. That's why it's getting downvoted.

Just because he doesn't know how they can do it profitably doesn't mean they don't know how to do it profitably.
Its probably a form of flattery, given that Russian Programmers who have emigrated to the west often have a high skill level.
According to US federal procurementology, would it be a conflict of interest to be both procurer and recipient of what is purchased?
Usual reasons: monopoly practices, market manipulations, deceptive sales and marketing technology, crashes and viruses due to low-quality outsourced code, etc.
I really, really dislike how much hate there is in this thread. I feel like someone always ends up making similar comments every time there's a new launch from Apple/Microsoft/Google/whomever, and there is never any change. Do you guys get psyched about anything?

On the one end we have "Oh man, iPad air only has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash, how stupid" and on the other end we have "iPad hasn't cured cancer yet; would have expected more from Apple under Steve Jobs."

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? The iPad, and devices like it, have done so much to enrich so many people's lives, and isn't that what we're about in this community? 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.

Maybe it's easy to get karma by ranting and raving, especially on a site like this where controversy drives more upvotes than downvotes simply because more people have upvote-only privileges. But I want us to be better than this; I don't want this to be the norm for discussion in this community.
In addition to management, a bunch of these can serve up files to the WAN side. On Netgear devices it is in a USB storage section.

I do scans from cellular devices (Fing on Android and iOS, is passable for popular ports) and my laptop (nmap) when out and about.
Pretty funny, I'm not a feminist or a conservative so I don't think there's anything wrong with this, although it looks like a recipe for getting ripped off.
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.

And that's the thing. By the evangelist's own admission, MS is deeply hated in society at large. It's understandable but unlike a lowly MS engineer (who I do pity), a professional corporate "face" can't play the innocent victim.

Just consider. The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

The point isn't that MS has more of a monopoly than other corporations. It is that MS has a long, long history of wielding the big stick of their monopoly openly and brutally against enemies and "non-combatants" alike. A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button because Balmer was gunning for a new market. Lie all you want about this being for the average person's benefit, you only prove my point. Yeah, I just don't think you can spin maneuvers like that into "we just build the future".

Edit: Just to note, I don't do editorial flagging. I'm not out to "get" MS but, well, they bring up feelings.
Even though I don't touch drugs (besides caffeine, duh) I tend to fall into the "legalize everything" category --

http://www.economist.com/node/13237193

My general stance is pretty much aligned with the above article; that drugs should have never fallen under a crime and punishment policy, but rather all focus should have been placed on public health policy. While I'm not pretending for a second that drugs don't ruin lives and families, it's only doubling the damage to criminalize these people's choices with little chance for rehabilitation.

This isn't even touching the political issues covered in the wonderful documentary The House I Live In

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/
If your bar is so high that the new Mac Pro's case is not called "innovative" I don't know what to tell you. It is almost self evidentially a out-of-the-box, non incremental approach to how to design the case of a desktop machine. You can decide you don't like it, but it's clearly innovative.
Yup I go to a well known state school and literally everyone has Macbooks. All the students, all the professors; EVERYONE.

Every company I've worked at in the past (both in SV and elsewhere) were ALL using Macbooks exclusively. Go to Silicon Valley and every company/startup there is probably all Mac'ed up from top to bottom with some remote linux boxes thrown in, usually accessed through a Macbook.

In fact I've seen the transition firsthand from my younger High School days to College. When I was in High School, it'd be very rare to see my friends or teachers, or just people in general with Macs. Now, it's surprising when someone DOESN'T have a Macbook. It's crazy. Macbooks are THE quintessential laptops... nay... computing devices in general for most people. Honestly, it's for a good reason too, they're solid for both the pros and mom/dads everywhere.

I might come off as a bit of an Apple fanboy here, and it's true I love their products, but the phenomenon I described above is independent of my personal views; it's something I've really observed around me.
Linus Torvalds master's thesis
Darpa slaps $2m on the bar for the ultimate security bug killer
Thanks. But wouldn't they still need to make a copy available e.g. In the court documents? That would definitely be an angle they would want to avoid
Pot, like gay marriage, has simply been a demographic matter of waiting for enough stuck up old people to finally die that the preponderance of opinion is in favor of it. When you're old, statistically speaking, people younger than you will be waiting for you to shuffle off, too.
I've never understood why prostitution is still illegal. A mutually acceptable transaction between two adults shouldn't be regulated.
That link (economist.com) is behind a paywall. Is there another link I can read?
I don't think he meant "talk down" in a negative way. I think he was trying to say that it clearly explained things to someone who doesn't know about the topic (while still being full of details to someone who does).
Google: "How to stop the drug wars - The Economist"
Interesting... I googled that, opened the exact same link and it worked? I suppose The Economist checks the referrer header or something?
It seems like we should be seeing heavy duty graphical editors that output CSS3 animations. Any tools exist yet?
Thanks for your insights. I share your priorities in terms of wanting to find a language that's widely used for general programming as well as the web. I'll have to spend more checking out Python!
The Real Privacy Problem
Without invoking any feminism or conservatism, I think it's fair to say that encouraging personal relationships to involve bribery (even if the use of the word is in a tongue-in-cheek manner) devalues them and pushes them towards being transactions. Call me old-school, but I do not want my personal, friend, or business relationships to be transactions.

My opinion would be that this seems like a very slick way (by both the app, and it's colourful carefree branding, and the article, written carefully to benefit from controversy and deflect criticism) to gloss over a fundamentally ugly idea.
Even if it is prostitution what is wrong with it ?
Probably the most logical answer to the question. Sometimes in the midst of all the speculation we forget about the simplest explanations.
Agreed. I started a successful company becoz i don't want to have a boss, and i'm really glad i did it!
Because it leads to trafficking.
That's different from "using itself as a key", which is what the GGP said.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is a tactic more aggressive than using open source but not contributing much back. Maybe you've forgotten how strong the MS dominance became in the late 1990s. Governments (US and EU) were going after MS -- not just aspects of their privacy agreements (as with Google today), but threatening to divide MS into separate corporations. Friendships were broken when people changed sides.

This was before the current tumult caused by the internet and mobile computing. It kind of seemed, back then, that things were going to just continue as they had been, only more so, and everything would be built on top of Windows.

This reaction (over-reaction?) to MS, then, comes from historically-rooted fear. It's a powerful emotion, and sometimes it can be correct.

You know, maybe there's an argument that the Unix world has a persecution complex, because there have been license and freedom debates since the very beginning. Here's an illustrative fragment:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/origins-of-geek...
That's awfully expensive for something with zero internal expandability that looks like a tiny wastebasket.
And, on OSX at least, every browser does this anyway, since the Keychain is right there to make use of and unlocking it is built into the OS. I'm really surprised Windows has no equivalent to this.
That's terrible. What will this to morale of people already working there? I know most folks are infatuated with appearances, but surely actual productivity and output should trump employees who "look good".
The crudeness of the intro video on the site and the PR material aside (quite successful in its sensationalistic goal) it's really interesting to read people's reactions to them. The idea is in fact prevalent in the animal kingdom, e.g. male spiders routinely give presents to females to mate with them (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0214_050214_...). The notion, of course, is that us, being humans, are way above these animalistic methods. Are we? As the Merovingian puts it: "And this is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it. We fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense. It is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely... out of control".
People care about tulips. They don't care about other variants much. This gives tulips value and not the other variants.

Both are true statements.