skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all let me say that of the research I follow, MS research is definitely in my top list. And you personally (with non MSR people like Jonathan Edwards) are among the few who try to help the crap we call programming which I hope you will pursue for a long time. I follow your research and your comments on HN.

On MS (mostly opinion here as most posters in this kind of thread):

I used to love MS in the 80s, because of the MSX [1]; to me that all was very open and nice.

With Windows 3.1 I saw something different; I was used to unix in university by then and Windows 3.1 was so horribly unstable and generally completely worthless that I thought the world had gone mad from buying and using that crap. I used to look in pity on the people sitting behind the very frequently crashing 3.1 (browsing with Netscape on 3.1 was like pulling teeth) machines as I sat behind Solaris which never crashed. Which made MS, to me, the company who releases things into the wild which do not work and they dare to ask money for it. I know they couldn't really help some of that; you could crash 3.1 as easy as DOS, but software under DOS crashed less frequently, wasn't that much of a pain to work with (one open application at a time; good for focusing too :). Matters became worse that, after a while, they had NT and still they were peddling, for money!, that 3.1 abomination on humanity.

With 95 things didn't improve much (at the time it seemed it did and up from 3.1 it did, but in the big scheme of things it still crashed all the time) and by then a solid version of NT was on the market so there was not much excuse for releasing '95. I became aware of their dubious business tactics against small companies and with their partners; as a result of the technical crap they released and their tactics I got 5 sparcstation 5 machines from my old uni for free and installed redhat on my PC.

I try Windows and the eco system ever so often;I have a Lumia; love the hardware, not the OS; many issues I've written about before. I tried to like Windows 7 and 8; 7 is ok, but not more than that and 8 is... weird. I wish they would've just had some balls and just only put Metro all the way with no way to go back. Now it's just, like the Surface; neither meat nor fish; not tablet, not laptop. For a client I had to install the MS-SQL/Sharepoint/Exchange etc stack and write some software on it; I thought I liked it at first, but after a while I got into the quirks which had no documentation and not much online relief.

Basically; I try to like MS their products ever so often because I think their should be competition; I just don't see any competition compared to what I use daily. And stuff like the Android patents still stings; unless they turn that back they haven't changed since the 90s and are still evil.

I don't 'hate' anything though; it's just something they shouldn't do if they want my money.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
1500 you wouldnt have to pay if the Mac Pro had some form of support for internal drives. Its 1500 you have to spend because Apple sacrificed expandability for design, size and light weight in a workstation computer.. It really only makes any sense if you need to lug the thing around alot (in which case i would think a top of the line macbook pro would be the better choice), or you just dont care about the money.
MVC released 2007/2008.
WebForms has it's own purpose: RAD development in corporate environment, for vast amount of ex-VB6 devs (or any desktop RAD drag'n'drop tool). It should bring desktop devs to webs, nothing else, and its done great job. Not that I like the result, but you could build forms - heavy apps in no time!
Under the WebForms and MVC is ASP.NET, and anybody could build their own web framework (and server) on top of it! Like today we have NancyFx, 6-7 years ago there was Monorail and some other MVC frameworks - but nobody used that. Because 90% of asp.net devs was exVB6 locked inside some corp building.
Today, with MVC, OWIN and healthy OSS ecosystem, things are different. Even MS is supporting OWIN web middleware, which will in the end allow running web app under win/linux without any change.
Oh how you must suffer typing that comment on the Surface RT you've been forced at gunpoint to use.
My first Android application:Chemik - Cool Chemistry Tool
Funny everyone assumes that "Pros" dont care about money. I just see this as 1500 bucks i dont have to spend when getting a workstation from another vendor.
What would the effect be?
I wouldn't say they were not commercially successful. In their market they must have generated sales of hard- and software of a billion dollars (dollars of the 80s). Was the Commodore C64 not successful, just because it is no longer used?

> For it to be useful, it should support some sorts of parallel-processing capabilities that conventional CPUs don't have. Perhaps pmap and preduce as SIMD instructions.

A Lisp Machine can be useful without that or with different architectures. In those days there were quite a few attempts to speed up Lisp. Thinking Machines sold the ultimate Lisp accelerator: the Connection Machine. Stuff like that was mind-blowing and mind-blowing expensive.

Remember, a useful Lisp Machine in the early 90s had a 40 Mhz cpu with 40bit architecture, a graphics accelerator for a second screen, 40 or more megabytes of memory, a 400 MB disk, 10Mbit/sec Ethernet, 5 Mbit/sec SCSI, ...

Today we get already multiples of those numbers for tiny money and a 64bit processor. Lisp runs nicely when implemented natively.
MatterRemix: Easy as Instagram for the 3D World
Text input is better in horizontal orientation. You have to turn on suggestions too..
Lack of cut and paste is frustrating.

Text input is not as slick as other phones..

Maps are not super good to use.

.. I tend not to write much text on it, as its a lot more effort.

Browsing is mostly good though a lot of sites will overload it.
Pull source code from any website
I just remember that at my last work, the hardware designer was using Solidworks for his CAD work, and the single-threaded rendering was an issue. There was an active community looking for the best cards to do that rendering on, and moderately high-level gaming cards did significantly better than the 'workstation' cards by Matrox and similar.

I don't know what price tier Solidworks is in, but looking at their site now, it's in the "get a quote" category, so they're not a consumer-level bit of software.
I was talking about virtualenv, not pyvenv - grandparent saying "virtualenv was released with python 3.3" made it sound like virtualenv was released with python 3.3...
But everyone decided they just wanted a paycheck anyway.
I wonder what would have happened in the United States. I think the DMCA probably couldn't be construed to apply to this, but I guess accessing Skype's servers could be considered exceeding authorized access, similar to the 3Taps case (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/207055/#axzz2i...)...
Grand parent's comment:

> Agreed. The cry for attention from the Microsoft community is becoming a bit annoying, especially on HN.

Implies that they aren't a new user. I guess they just don't post much.
> Makes upgrades easy: plug it in, rather than having to tear the box apart.

In theory yes, in practice it comes with a hefty price tag. External thunderbolt disk arrays are quite expensive and something that would be unnecessary if the mac pro had some form of support for internal drives.
I'm using bitstamp. I think it wasn't too bad to get on. I had to send a photo of my driver's license then transfer money on using transferwise.
Right idea wrong arguments - Apple has always hated their users having experiences they could not control. So the open web is indeed a threat for them especially with browsers (sadly slowly) turning into universal runtimes it could threaten their iOS model and they are pushing OsX into that direction too. So in the long run expect as much tightening as they can get away with on the browser front. "Think of the security" is the new "Think of the children".

But apple maps don't have a reason to be web site - there is google maps that they could not match, so they are forced to go a different route.
> It set off the flamewar detector.

This seems to be a recurring issue on HN, and a reliable generator of conspiracy theories. Would it be possible to have a small label signaling when a given article was flagged by the detector?
Was the previous comment edited? There's no --nointeraction flag there.
In the classical economy spirit one could expect that the mining power supply and demand will be optimized by the invisible hand of the market. It seems to me too that there might be less costs and negative externalities implicitly bound to bitcoin operation as compared to paper money.
Mavericks: non-signed apps can no longer elevate permissions to root level
Knowledge of the language is a big factor, but it's far from being the only one. How fast one is able to create things is an example of another important factor. There are many more.
+1, I would add that bosses I had before I went on my own, were actually very nice.
A while ago when 1 btc was < $0.1 usd, there was a site called the bitcoin tap (or something like that) which gave away free bitcoins for experimentation. I was too lazy to save my free bitcoin :<
My mom uses her iPad to get in touch with her friends on Facebook. She uses it to Skype with her sister who lives in another country everyday. She enjoys browsing family photos and videos on her iPad. She enjoys reading stuff on the web using iPad.

She is 60 and she never learned to use PCs and laptops but she easily uses iPad for the things I mentioned.

iPad has definitely enriched her life.
Yep. You can also use incognito mode to follow the link, or even just copy paste the url
This makes me laugh, mostly because it will alienate the French govt from the US Govt, but also because its basically anti-IP.
OT: is macports the best package manager for a developer? Considering buying my first Mac. (Macbook Pro 13 is perfect hardware for me)
I only know python well and am looking for another language to learn. C was on the shortlist, but after this, crikey. At least I now know it's not going to be an easy ride.
> This Site Totally Doesn't Work Without JavaScript.

Fail!
Quite so~

There is a difference between being keen to see the new features in the next version of .Net, and having Microsoft suddenly decide, actually, we dont care about .Net anymore, XNA is cancelled, metro apps are javascript only now. All that WFC stuff you were doing with windows phone... yeah, forget that.

People invest their time and knowledge in a technology stack, and Microsoft just seem to love throwing things away rather than improving them.

When you set fire to the developers that use your technology, are you really surprised when they don't want to have anything to do with you?

I've only seen this anecdotally, but new developers who haven't yet been set on fire seem to be very positive about the integrated MS stack.

...and slightly older jaded developers who are on fire, and looking for jobs using technology no one cares about anymore say things like 'I'll never use microsoft technology again'.

That's just been my personal experience, but I've got to admit, seeing it, I'm pretty skeptical about investing any more of my time in learning to use MS stack for anything.

...but yes. C# is quite a nice language. I fully endorse the use of Xamarins offerings (ie. C# .Net outside of microsofts control)
The court follows the EC Directive for legal protection of computer programs, specifically Article 6. Every EU country should have laws in place that allow for reverse engineering within certain limits.

See page 4 [PDF]:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...
It would have been rational for the price to drop after SR. This might then be irrational exuberance.
If you're interested in using d3, check out dc.js ... http://nickqizhu.github.io/dc.js/ ... it's d3 with crossfilter.js added. Really useful for linking interactive charts together - filter on one applies the filter to all. And it's damn fast.
> Pure CSS3
You forgot the main reason : because it goes against your preconceived ideas about "The French".
One way is as you said is by spending a lot of time programming and building stuff.

The slide deck says, the only way is the experience. You need to read and learn endlessly over the years.

Like you I hope there was one book, that does this. Makes a nice idea for a community project. Compiling such massive wisdom into a book can't be done by a person alone.

Currently its a bit like alchemy, looks very little chemistry and much more magic. And to learn there are hardly any resources beyond your regular C books, which more or less keep talking of the same things.
The points made in this (excellent I thought) presentation are very subtle and I'm not sure I would have come across them before organically. Because the behavior outlined in the presentation tends toward the exception, it's more efficient to learn it by reading. Effective C++ is a great place to start if you are trying to hone your C++ skills (practically every C++ programmer in the industry considers it mandatory).

Keep in mind though, that knowing about evaluation order, and stack frames, and sequencing, and linker optimizations is all great and all, but I definitely consider it icing on the cake for a working software engineer for most positions. If you're a senior guy, sure, you should know this stuff. But the first thing to do is learn to actually write programs well. Authoring your own projects and contributing to open source is a great way to do it.
This is simply historically incorrect. Waterfall means a single pass by definition.

Royce described the pre-existing state of the art - the single-pass model (Waterfall) - and suggested a modification to a 2-pass model. (This can be seen as a precursor to Boehm's n-pass Spiral model.)

To suggest that the single-pass model was invented later as a corruption of Royce's paper is nonsense. Virtually all software was developed this way both before and after the paper.

What is odd is that the earliest and most commonly cited reference to the Waterfall methodology is a paper that explicitly says that it doesn't work. Let this be a lesson on not burying the lede.
LibreOffice Embedded Firebird/HSQLDB performance comparison
What the language standard does not specify (and is very explicit about not doing) is padding between struct members, if any. However, the ABI spec for the compilation target details exactly how a struct must be laid out. If this were not the case, libraries could not work.
Thanks for the comment. I'm attending Splash next week and Jonathan will be there, I can't wait!

My post was about whether Microsoft articles were getting an unfair shake due to flagging; I truly believe that people should upvote for what they want to talk about and ignore what they don't. That's it. This is not about attention or whether MS products are good or not. Its whether the Nokia tablet story deserved to be thrown off the front page by a bunch of trolls even if it had the upvotes to stay on for an hour or so more.
Bringing await to C++
The cheapest available model listed in OpenWRT's table of (supported) hardware. Then flash it with OpenWRT and all's fine (mostly).

E.g. TP-Link's WR841N for 20 dollars:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001FWYGJS
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr841nd
Totally disagree with this. I've worked with plenty of fantastic programmers who are basically worthless without the guidance of a good lead/producer/designer.

Nonobligatory image to support statement:
http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...
Agreed. I'm a mostly happy Aple user, however some of my most up voted comments have been those pointing out deep flaws in Apple systems and tool. Discuss iTunes hatred, iCloud pain, design failings or shines screens and watch the up votes roll in.
It's all relative. I would consider a 10 somebody who could write the C++ compiler without guidance for example. And probably give myself a 4 as a result.
>In an interview, I would much rather hear a person say something about a statically declared variable with no initialization being poor code to leave behind for the next person than some arcana about the standard.

Why are you forcing those two choices? One could be well-versed with the arcana AS WELL AS point out that bit about statically declared variable ..

The problem IMO is most programmers cargo-cult/copy-paste/stackoverflow their way into programming jobs. No, that does not mean you never ask for help. No, that does not mean you never copy-paste. (Phew!)

Its sort of like when you're learning math. Great mathematicians can understand the theory and just apply it to whatever problem they come across. Its because they have a very solid foundation underneath them. They wield their knowledge like tools and can just build anything with those tools because they understand those tools very well. Most students however just learn the patterns of the problems. And once they know enough patterns they can solve problems which fit into one of those pre-understood patterns.

The people who are deeply knowledgeable about the language are good at knowing the boundaries of the language, knowing when you're using constructs that are not valid-syntax (which still compile), etc. The social aspect of 'good comments' , 'readable code' or 'maintainable code' is also important. You can have programmers that do both. Ofcource those programmers will never work for 'you' (not you, personally..) because most programming jobs are shitty and do not require programmers of that skill. You'll find them toiling away in anonymity, working in research labs, working on compiler optimizers or operating systems or some other domain with challenging technical problems.
Me too and this is frustrating. With 64bit processor we would expect bigger ram since data grow it's size.
1GB seems too small and I fear I'll hit the memory size wall again too soon. May be the next iPad will have a bigger ram.
I totally agree about the annoyingness of the intro/outro, but what is the difference in your opinion between things being "grown by the tree" and "extracted from the soil"?

Isn't that all trees (and, dare I say it, most other living organisms) do: extract atoms from the soil (and the surrounding air, of course), and grow themselves from those?
The upgrade path for Windows 8.1 is pretty confusing - it differs depending on what edition you have.
You know those articles on stackoverflow which are marked 'matter of opinion, not constructive'?

yeah. this. That.

(I fully endorse discussion about meaningful topics, but I think it's a bit stupid to have a microsoft vs. not microsoft post push up at the top of HN. Everyone, post your opinion on this topic now, instead of actually talking to each other~)
What utter rubbish. Apple have their own proprietary mapping data and are exposing it through a Mac App. In what way is that anything to do with the web?

In no time flat I can think of a handful of reasons why Apple has exposed their mapping data through an app rather than a web site. Firstly they probably can't expose it on the web even if they want to due to licensing restrictions on the data they have sourced. I wouldn't mind betting they signed for non-web rights. Secondly by having the data in an app on iOS and OSX they can integrate the two via iCloud such as with shared pins, shared routing info, etc. Finally if the mapping app is local, it can integrate better with other local OSX apps such as iPhoto for displaying geo-tagged photos.

Meanwhile, Apple releases a bunch of fully native web versions of their iWork suite, because it makes sense to do so. Honestly, I expect much better than this from the Guardian.
The top option for learning is to work off a spec to implement your own compiler. A good second place would be exhaustively studying and maintaining an existing compiler.

Regular use of a language can build certain kinds of knowledge about the internals, but it won't be as well-rounded a study as actually working with them directly.
IPad Mini gets heavier?
How to fix Python 3 Segfault issue with OS X Mavericks
I'm not sure where I read it, but I do remember that plants such as broccoli and similar species can suck out heavy metals from the ground. Not sure how much or how fast, though.
Looks like someone isn't reading anything!
>Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" >faster than I could learn the last great thing.

Same here. I design databases, and MS kept bringing new data access methods every three years; I never could wrap my head around the ADO/DAO difference, but that did not matter for long because both were replaced by .Net

I sincerely wondered if this was not a deliberate tactic by Microsoft : while developpers are busy learning their newest "next great thing", they can't invest time in anything else.

Meanwhile I learned how to use an OSS lamp stack and have been happily using it for the last 10 years. Very stable and reliable, I could not be happier.
If B() is noexcept then A() is actually exception safe. The only thing which could happen would be bad_alloc but then v does not have to be deleted any more.
Don't upgrade to Mavericks (yet) if you are using GPGTools
And moreover, they could have closed-source the parts that they eventually released under BSD.
From Italy, I always looked at the Netherland's position on drugs as the way forward. Really hope the change opinion that is happening in the US will also happen all over Europe soon (as it did in Portugal, and with great results, IIRC)
It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework.

As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way.

Most .NET developers learn what they need to know for the project at hand. A year ago, I worked on a fairly cutting-edge EF Code-First n-tier project, with knockout.js on the front end, using ASP.NET MVC web API. I am currently extending a crufty ASP.NET 2.0 webforms app.

Adaptability is an important skill for developers. Also, each iteration of the Microsoft data access stack feels like an improvement over the earlier ones, so it's not an unbearable burden to learn it.

And at the end of the day, the greatest irony was that when I finally broke into the market, it was a Java-based developer role on the basis of my JavaScript. So all my years of frantically spinning the .NET wheel was for naught.

Hiring someone for a Java job, based on their JavaScript knowledge is fairly unconventional (to put it politely). Are you certain that the general programming knowledge you acquired through "spinning the wheel" wasn't a factor?
He goes to some pain to make the page breaks logical and helpful rather than click whoring. He has discussed this on podcasts at length, most recently on ATP. I appreciate this may address a point you aren't making.
Very true. As far as headers concerned, we actually dig very deep. For instance, we will look at little encoding-related nuances, which can help identify spoofed headers (ua and IPs are fakeable, after all) :)
Also, we look for abnormalities in header order while being aware of variants that can derive from using various devices, proxies, etc.
Hence the 10M signature pool, which grows as new variants are spotted across our network.
Nothing lasts forever