skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the word for businessmen who sell goods at less than the cost to produce them is "bankrupt". I don't doubt more than a few miners have lost quite a bit of money selling below cost -- probably most without realizing it -- but I have to assume they have all been weeded out by now, given the notorious fierceness of the mining world. Selling BTC below cost might help stave off bankruptcy for one billing cycle, but on the next you'll be deeper in the hole than you were before.
Without reading any other comments, I would say that Microsoft does not have any goodwill left. Everyone respects Microsoft research, but it has to be something interesting enough to stand on its own merit to be worth caring about. The flipside is that there are tons of people that really like Apple for some reason, though I suspect that will fade in time.
Here's the deal:
Despite having some awesome tech and many talented employees, Microsoft as a corporation has a history of shitting on developers, smaller companies and independents. There's a history of threatening OSS, monopoly abuse, abandoning APIs, bad certs, crapware, gross mismanagement, ignoring constructive requests and a very bad case of Not Invented Here. And they do have an history of astro-turfing and aggressive social media promotion.

Disclosure:
I've primarily worked as a MS stack developer and admin for over two decades. But I've also used a full spectrum of other technologies over the years, too. I've been agnostic and objective when it come to the industry, but I've eaten enough excuses from Redmond. There's good alternatives, I'm exploring more of them.
I like the idea, Thanks!
I need to do some charts and other customized data visualizations on ipad. Is using webview with D3.js a good option for the ipad ? Any suggestions?
You're right about that. My background is MS since I started getting a real job in the late 90's.

I'd like to be more hipsterish and start-up with open source, but with BizSpark and free Visual Studio and Azure and being able to build quickly just because of my familiarity with the MS stack it's very hard not to stay locked in to that ecosystem.

I'm writing this now inside Microsoft on George street who let's you use their offices for free surrounded by MS <3 start-up standees and brochures.

We all know suspiciously it's MS's evil lurings to try to appeal to the startup scene so we can keep giving $$$ to them after our freebies have expired. However I'm also sanguine that they may have a change in attitude with their open source contributions and startup initiatives and linux or node images on Azure they might be genuinely wanting to be more "open".

That's what I'm hoping for. I am not looking forward to being stung with a massive SQL licence bill.
Sagers are nice.
You could just use OCaml, of which it is an obvious copy. You wouldn't get the whole MS stack, for better or worse.
"What you haven't shown is that the market is liquid when it comes to cashing out".

I showed it. When 2 million coins are changing hands per month, it means 2 millions coins are sold/"cashed out" (and 2 millions bought).

"That's the only statistic that matters: how much USD-equivalent is being injected into/out of system. That tells you whether they're being hoarded."

No. If the rate of transactions per user remains constant, and if the user base grows, you would see exactly that: more USD being injected in the system, than being taken out of it. This would not mean there is hoarding, but simply that the economy is growing (which is exactly what is happening). Again when you see a single Bitcoin payment processor like Bitpay reaching the "10 thousand vendors signed up" milestone, it is hard to reject the claim that the Bitcoin economy is growing...
I have and use the following phones iPhone 1, Nexus 4, Nokia 520, ZTE Open.

I really like the ZTE Open and am switching to it for full time use. But I'd generally advise at this stage most people would not be happy to do this. The touch screen is unresponsive, the phone is generally sluggish and the range of apps is limited. The apps that are there have limited functionality. I think it would be a much better experience built with say LuaJIT and FFI and a kernel of C routines for heavy lifting in apps. But it is what it is, and ultimately I'm a big fan of the experiment Mozilla is undertaking using Web technologies to deliver such a platform - but its going to be a long road. Part of this is also colored by my experiences developing for Android and iOS.

The reason I'm switching is that I prefer to carry a cheaper phone around, and I only need very basic services (basically happy to receive phone calls, and send texts and occasionally browse to a web page in an emergency). I am also very impressed philosophically with what Mozilla is trying to achieve here. I almost returned the Nexus 4 and Nokia 520 when I got them because it is very difficult to set them up without getting funnelled into over sharing your private information with cloud services.

My second choice of phone would be the Nokia 520 for pure value for money. But my view is only an iPhone or an Android device have first class web browsing capabilities and first class app ecosystems. Go with the Nokia 520 and its a reasonable (if simple phone), but does the basics (_except_ notification) well.

My third choice is my old iPhone 1, it does what it says on the tin. Its stuck on a very old version of iOS, but I think its fine for a phone.

My final choice is the Nexus 4. Its the best built of the phones. It has the best range of apps. Using Android feels like a real chore to me.
Why remake blaze when you could just go without the rules for common operation?
I do not have qualitative data backing up my conjecture, but i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. This maybe selective bias at play, but maybe in future I will scrape some data from hnrankings about this. Even though interpretation will still be flimsy. The reason behind flags will not be known and can be various. That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.
Microsoft Research is a great place for a PhD to work! We get lots of freedom in our research, some of which goes on to make big contributions to not only our products, but to the field as a whole!
IANAL, but if I understand correctly, to claim copyright infringement, they would have had to register the work with the library of congress, and essentially make it publicly viewable - which I assume they didn't want.

Copyright in this kind of case is usable almost exclusively by GPL style licenses, where the code is already available.
That's different. Browsers need to show your password to external websites to prove to others that you're you. This requires storing the actual password. They expose saved passwords in the UI because if they didn't, it would create a false sense of security. There's always going to be some way to get the saved passwords, or the feature wouldn't work.

The router admin interface only needs to check your password. It can do that by storing only a cryptographic hash, not the password itself.
>Challenged does not mean 'prevent'ed it can be argued later as a matter of law that the warrant should not have been issued, and that the evidence acquired as a result is inadmissible.

This is not the case and it is called the "good faith" exception. The police officers when acting in good faith under a warrant that is latter found to invalid does not make the evidence inadmissible.

Given this do you now believe there is good reason to fight back against unreasonable warrants?
Browsers need to store the passwords in plaintext, because they need to populate the password field when you visit that website. However, you can store them encrypted using a master password and decrypt them once per session.
Installing mono was significantly more complicated than most vm/language packages on Ubuntu, and required commensurately more upkeep.
Google unveils service to bypass government censorship, surveillance
Year old review (software improves) and you may have missed this: http://cdn.arstechnica.net//wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Scree...
Apple were special when they innovated. There is iteration, but no innovation.
Why is it not standard practice for people who work in security or anything remotely contentious to keep their work OS, programs, data and so on, on a usb stick that you can just hide somewhere when you are not working on it?
This is good news, but it's important to remember that the way Coinbase works is for Coinbase to keep the private keys. A Coinbase "wallet" is really more like a Coinbase demand deposit account. That means you are trusting Coinbase to hold on to your bitcoins, thus losing one of the key benefits of bitcoin, which is that you hold your money. A better alternative is the Blockchain.info app, but from my understanding this is not available for un-jailbroken iPhones (please correct me if I'm wrong).
> They are already pretty cheap -- the Areca ARC-8050 8 bay bare is $1499.

Are you having a giggle there, mate?
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Same here, I've been watching bitcoin for a while, and thought about tossing a few hundred dollars at it to play around with the technology, and to leave a couple of coins in case it catches on over time. However, the process looks like a nightmare.

I expect things to be instant. Why can't I buy a few bitcoins with my credit card and have them in my account within the next few minutes? Why do I need to go through this lengthy verification process? Why are there countless complaints about people having difficulties converting bitcoins back into dollars? I understand a lot of this is outside of bitcoin's control, but with these kind of hoops to jump through, I can't see it ever catching on. I expected more, and the entire thing feels unpolished and amateur. When people recommend using craigslist or ebay, dealing with random strangers and paying a 25% premium just to get a simple coin, it's a failure.
" Frankly, this entire window is a user-interface disaster. And we haven't even mentioned the checkbox to the right of each label. Can you guess what those do? (No, there's no tooltip when you hover over one.) I'll spoil the surprise. When that box is checked, it means the Tag appears in the Finder sidebar; unchecked means it doesn't."

I think he overlooked the text right on top of the menu, which says "Show these tags in the sidebar:". Pretty obvious to me.
Don't forget the "Hacker" in Hacker news: it is very natural, reasonable, expected and even necessary for Hackers to have a strong and marked preference towards open protocols, open source software, and to dislike monopolies, walls, closedness, blind rule abiding, etcetera.

A convoluted spirit might believe hackers like closed doors because they enjoy breaking in and would like more of them. But that is wrong, just as it is wrong to believe that physicians would love to have more deadly diseases to play with.
That still doesn't make for a fair comparison for what the Air is, but what you'd use it for. The two are not the same.

As far as performance goes, my 2011 11" Macbook Air was my primary development machine for a year (in both Xcode and IntelliJ/Scala). That Air also sported better battery life than any of the Eee PC line. It was more expensive, sure, but $500 is not very much when I'm using the machine for 6+ hours every day of the year. It was also more capable than that Eee PC and ran an operating system I found actually enjoyable to use (versus merely tolerable in the case of Windows or Linux); I have no problem paying $200-$300 more simply because of the feature that is OS X because for me, it's better.

And I haven't even touched on the build quality, which--in rather stark contrast to your attempted handwaving of an Air being "insubstantial" in another comment in this thread--is fantastic and makes me feel happy to use it, makes me enjoy working with it more. (Form is not superfluous. Pleasing form makes interacting with the computer more enjoyable, much like a well-designed tool in my shop or my kitchen.)
I meant, the bias was real and documented in this case. But as pg pointed out, the article got killed because a flamewar was detected: basically a bunch of Microsoft haters took a dump on the article...and its history.

In general, many MS articles make it through, and I didn't notice any overt Microsoft hate until last night (or this morning your guys time).
Rails is an actual MVC framework, ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. And it took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.
• The biggest smile was moving them from VSS to GIT (+GHE)

• Replacing Windows servers with Redhat has opened up a wealth of automation opportunities

• RoR on the frontend has allowed a much faster development and deployment pipeline (ASP.NET and Java are still used for the high-ceremony stuff)

• Our monitoring and alerting is much more straightforward and comprehensive for the OSS components

• I am so tired of propping up sickly MS servers, the Redhat servers are rock solid straight out the gate

OTOH for large enterprise, Sharepoint and Office integration works very well, that's really the MS sweetspot. I'm also interested in their new ALM offering (TFS), I haven't seen an OSS equivalent as yet. However these are not dev stacks.

I'm not saying you can't do great stuff using MS tech - stackoverflow is proof of that. But I have extensive experience in both worlds, and I'll take OSS any day.
lit·er·al·ly

1. in a literal manner or sense; exactly.

2. used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.

Words are literally defined by how they are actually used by humans over time. If I hold up a sign saying "Free Donuts", no one is going to think I mean that pastries should be liberated. To unnecessarily cling to the word "free" when it has a more obvious secondary meaning is to tilt at windmills; there is no shortage of synonyms.
Coinbase is very easy to use. It'll take a while to get to the level that you can do instant purchases. They have a max number to sell per day so if the market is volatile you can't participate that well through Coinbase. As an entry point it's very professional. It does both me that there is no password verification on initial signup. What if you made a typo?
> None of that matters to me enough to make me spend hundreds of dollars more and be content with a laptop that does less.

But it's enough for you to get absurdly combative and trollish?
They look really powerful. What OS do you run on it?
Progress bars cannot be accurate
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Exactly. I have a thin Nexus 4, but I have to carry a chunky extra USB battery because a) no replaceable battery and b) thin built in battery doesn't last long enough (yes, this is also Android's fault but that's not my point)
So has anyone used any of the open hardware alternatives, like routerboard.com ? Seems like having the schematics and the firmware would be a reasonable place to be.
This! Many hackers who were growing up in the nineties had their opinions of Microsoft negatively affected by the strongarm tactics applied against Linux and open-source/free software. I'd say this strategy continues - e.g. "secure" boot, but the late nineties was when the animosity between the two groups peaked and it has never quite gone away.

And I'd add the antitrust case and IE's intransigence to web standards as another major reason that this distrust exists.
Let me quote from Wikipedia here:

"On 8 September 2005, the Seoul Central District Court ruled that the GPL was not material to a case dealing with trade secrets derived from GPL-licensed work. Defendants argued that since it is impossible to maintain trade secrets while being compliant with GPL and distributing the work, they are not in breach of trade secrets. This argument was considered without ground."
It was high quality content. It didn't get removed from the front page because of the content of the story. Rather, because of comments like yours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596311

> I always find it funny when new members of a community assail veterans with accusations of eternal September type of behaviour.

You new people and your eternal September behavior...
I've noticed that the scrolling behavior on Mavericks is eeeever so slightly different. When I'm reading on a laptop, I like to scroll the text so that the line of text above the current line disappears by one pixel. This requires a very fine level of control.

I find that the new scrolling behavior is too sensitive, and there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to the original.
A browser has to be able to supply clear-text passwords to websites, so strong hashing and discarding the clear-text won't work in their use-case. Your router only need to authenticate your password, so it _should_ be using bcrypt/scrypt/pbkdf2 to hash the password and not storing it anywhere in clear-text.
Correct, I go as far as to not even really consider Coinbase a wallet, even though I know that's what there shooting for. I still like using Coinbase to buy when dips occur, It's the easiest way for US residents.

Blockchain.info web interface I believe works on the iPhone, albeit It's been a while since I've been there. If you really want to embrace Bitcoin, build from source https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
...you could easily be fired for doing it.

Except he wasn't fired; he was sent to federal prison. Those two results are not equivalent.
Try living in Australia. It's a great country but Amazon won't ship many things to me.
Ah, this just illustrates how much hardware companies suck at building software.
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I have never heard about astroturfing happening in the company before, and besides, I'm in research.

We are allowed to post from our computers at work. I'm sure, given that Microsoft has 100k employees, that there must be a few bad apples in the bunch: you know, statistically speaking, their will be a few mentally unbalanced people doing things that Microsoft might not otherwise approve of.
I would like them to integrate the skills/expertise set from stackoverflow.com for sw engineers. That probably adds more credibility IMO.
> Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like

I do not think the important topic of Ethics should be brought so low as to help us decide on whether to flag or not a link on HN. Let's replace it by "stupid".

Then yes, it is stupid to flag a post just because it relates to a company we do not like.

However, it is not stupid to dislike Microsoft. You might remember Paul Graham's Microsoft is Dead(1): for people a bit older than 20, Microsoft is a company which was very frightening, a company which did really try to kill Internet, and force all our industry into a nightmarish path where we programmers would all be happy slaves.

Just because they have changed the color of their last make-up will not change this, and I would hope Hackers here and there would actually despise more Microsoft and other similarly dangerous companies.

(1) http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Not only that, the ecosystem for Thunderbolt is far from flourishing. I searched a couple of months ago, when the original announcement was made, and the external enclosures are very expensive, in the range of $1500. That's without adding the cost of a bunch of disks.

I've decided that Windows 7 is my last Windows version. Once my current machine hits EOL, I really want a Mac Pro, but I need a way to get lots of storage that is reliable, reasonably priced and relatively quiet.
In diapers? Yes, there is.

As for Formula? You can't just change to whatever is cheapest that week.
If you think the 8" screen is big enough then sure. But I happen to like the larger display. Could Apple charge more for the iPad Mini based on some kind of "smallness premium"? Well, in general 7" tablets are selling for dirt cheap, so it wouldn't play well.
I would expect it to top out at significantly more than $5k
Very dry humor!
That does sound relaxing...
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Out of curiosity what made you leave Apple (or consider it)?

This is coming from a former die-hard MS guy turned Apple fan boy. It's like Apple took what I love (*nix) and just made the best desktop experience for it. Yeah, I hate the prices but even the hardware is unbeatable--what I've seen so far that is.

However, I'll always still be searching for a true Linux desktop OS and appropriate hardware for it that doesn't feel like it will break if I carry it around with one hand while open.
I disagree that great apps need to be resource intensive. To borrow from another industry, "12 Angry Men" is still a great movie despite a complete lack of whiz bang special effects. A great app is about the story, not the photo-realism.

At least for the upgrade market (of existing iPad owners), Apple does not benefit (much) from great apps that run fine on an iPad 1 or iPad 2.
I should upvote the articles I like more often, instead of just clicking on those with interesting headings.
To be fair, if you're the person that the mac pro is aimed at and you can drop $3k on a machine, another 1.5 for a decent drive array isn't that outlandish.
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Which is kind of my point. Flagging stories just because you don't like Microsoft is counter to the site's purpose. Even downvoting because you don't like Microsoft doesn't improve the site.

If I'm building something, and I'd benefit hugely from some Microsoft news, your disdain for the company has just hurt my project.

Flag or downvote a cat picture. But not because you happen to dislike the camera the picture was taken on, but because cat pictures aren't relevant to the site.
What are you actually trying to argue?
Then we are in agreement. Is it possible to downvote articles? Maybe I haven't reached that karma threshold yet.
Yup. The heavy equipment process create an additional barrier to entry. If you want to bid for a govt contract, you need to hire someone who has done it before, otherwise you'll drown in paperwork. What's really sad about this situation is that it is stable - eg. existing stakeholders (contractors & govt procurement personnel) will work hand in hand to ensure that the process stays in place - the former to make more money and the latter to retain their jobs.
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This is where I need a techy co-founder to take over what I've built. The ultimate solution would work like depositing a check through a mobile banking app. The user should be prompted to submit an instant self-portrait that must be taken using camera on the device while logged into either the website, mobile site or mobile apps. This will be considered the "training set". Next they must submit an image of a government issued photo identification document that is valid at the date of submission & clearly reads well so that the name & date of birth may be compared to the information already verified with the user of an optical reader. The images must be resolute enough to allow for pixelation, alpha numeric scanning & detection, & facial detection & recognition using Principal Component Analysis (PCA); one of the most successful techniques that have been used in image recognition & compression. By manually entering the name, DOB & ZIP it can be compared to what was read by the optical reader & the faces can be compared. The result is a pass or fail based on the fidelity or correlation threshold.
My iPad 1 has been basically a brick for awhile.
So the article might be useful to people building businesses in the tech space, but because some users decided to air their petty grievances in the _comments_ to that story, the story itself got buried?

Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.
Not sure doubling 1 and 4 would really be a transportation revolution. : P
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