skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that computing is trending towards mobile and Microsoft's actions in this space have been a disaster. So big deal if Microsoft is still making money. So was Blackberry the day the iPhone was announced. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't be asking serious questions about its long term viability.

As for the specific products you mentioned Visual Studio and Azure piggyback on the strength of the overall Windows ecosystem. If that suffers then everything suffers. And Xbox is facing a resurgent Sony in the next round of console wars.
There are two types of turnarounds:

1) The place is burning to the ground, and if we don't fix it we'll run out of money.

2) We are wasting money and losing our value* at an unacceptable rate.

Each of these requires someone different. The first requires someone decisive more than anything else. The second requires a combination of strategic thinking and discipline. The irony is Ballmer probably could have done the first type of turnaround well. Of the names frequently mentioned, some seem to be good at technology strategy, some seem to be good at discipline. I don't know of any who are good at both.

IBM was in situation #1 when Gerstner took over, so his primary value was decisiveness. Over time he was able to switch to strategic vision and discipline.

* - I am purposefully vague on value. It could mean shareholder value, it could mean intangible brand value, it could mean market strength, it could mean value to employees...
It's obvious you haven't used Windows 8 and then Windows 8.1 because the "start button" is identical functionality wise in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and anyone that has used both knows it.

In Windows 8, there was no button unless you scrolled the mouse to the lower-left of the screen. When you did that, a button that even was labeled "Start" showed up. When you clicked it, you were brought to what people commonly call the "metro" screen.

In Windows 8.1, there is a permanent recognizable button with the picture of a Window on it in the lower-left of the screen. When you click it, you are brought to the "metro" screen.

No functionality difference in the start button. The only people appeased are those that were looking for something to complain about.
I love HoNY, but it's been around for ages — the Facebook page has almost 2 million likes. I'm curious why it's hitting HN now.

That's not an angry "BOO! REPOST!" complaint, I'm actually curious. All of my friends have been familiar with it for years, but maybe it's just a New York thing?
Facebook goes open source with query engine for big data
Ask HN: what is this?
Ask HN: How do I report spam?
Here's the background: I am a Hilton Honors member and as a result, Hilton has my email address. About 2-3mos ago I started noticing a lot of promotional emails (mostly "deals" - e.g., $79 at hotel x, etc.). They seemed to be coming fairly frequently, so I "unsubscribed". This did not appear to have any effect as the emails continued to flow. I then unsubscribed again, but this time I took a screenshot of the confirmation page shown after doing so. I'm now still getting these emails (it's been about 2 weeks since I took the screenshots), so I'm wondering if there is something I can do to report them? My most recent email from them was about "win a grammy weekend in LA". Any suggestions?
"Minor" versions of chrome have also completely broken significant features. There seems to be a curse where becoming a powerful browser company makes you do really bad things.
The reason cigarettes are trafficked is taxes. It happens in the US, too. That's just a symptom of heavy taxation as a gradual form of prohibition. The inducement to trafficking is the same as for prohibition.
Why does the iPad 2 still exist?
Hey 67726e, you're right. We're currently showing the best rates for these countries, meaning that we have more than one courier provider for them in our database to allow comparison. All the other countries should work nevertheless simply without "good" (cheap) rates. So it's our bad, apologies!
Because bitcoin! Way of the future man!

No thanks, I'll stick with insured deposits. Imagine if your bank called you up and said "Your money is gone, but we're reeeeeally sorry."
The FBI would probably come knocking with a warrant demanding that all Bitcoins that has passed thru Silk Road should be added to the list, because thus founds comes from illegal activities.
Forced extinction of a horrible browser. Sounds alright to me.
So for those three levels, do I have to count the object and method-level indents, or is it a rule for languages with unindented includes?
Circle (https://circleci.com/) is also using Clojure. I usually ctrl-f through "Who's Hiring?" posts for Clojure out of curiosity and there are generally 3-6 companies each month. Most seem to be using Clojure in conjunction with other JVM languages like Scala or Java itself (Circle is an exception).
Looks good! My search did timeout with a couple of attempts on "We are searching" (don't know if it's the HN effect). It worked on the third try.

A minor copy change suggestion:

"only pay after you created" -> "only pay after you create"
You and I are also decomposing, I wouldn't say we smell like decomposing animal. The rate of decomposition changes the dominant smell, so it's not really valid to say that bacon smells like decomposing dead animal, because it smells much more like other things.
RPI really wouldn't be my first pick; even with the arm asm crypto, you end up with <10Mbps at 100% CPU, I believe.

I've been trying to find a super-cheap embedded board with better crypto performance. A silvermont atom might be the best choice, and use the crypto performance both for VPN and for some kind of NAS with good disk crypto.
It took up about 2/3s of the screen on my phone; it made me stop reading quite quickly!
How Failed A/B Tests Can Increase Conversion Rates
Something I wrote up a long time ago:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HMxg6fv_yig_mVvnxsC8CwTf...

Unfortunately I haven't had time to update the code, and it doesn't work with more recent versions of emacs. Now I'm using vim and all-spaces-all-the-time.
The tax and regulation issue is at best a sideshow, and, at worst, will keep traffickers in business.

The real issue is to transition the law enforcement and prison spending to addiction treatment spending.
Simple, clean and to the point. Exactly what a emergency service website needs to be.
So, I don't understand. Why does bitcoin have such high deflation?

Is this just because there has been a constant stream of people switching their traditional currencies for bitcoins at a rate faster than bitcoins can be mined?

Presumably at some point bitcoin will stop being deflationary if it ever wants to be useful as a currency. When does that happen?

Why do people buy bitcoins if it isn't really useful as a currency yet? I mean, there are supposedly 3.5 billion USD worth of bitcoins in existence, but if I want to buy any sort of physical product or pay for utilities, I have to use a traditional currency.

Currently it appears that bitcoins are most popularly used for less than legal purposes (payment for drugs, payment for services to avoid taxes, payment for blackhat services). Does this mean that by buying into bitcoin, I'm essentially providing USD to these black market activities which might not have had USD to begin with?

Many questions I don't understand...
hahaha, yes that's the HN effect. I didn't expect that that many people would click on it and we're now staring at GA overwhelmed by the response... Can't even work on the bugs now because the server got so slow.
Thanks for the suggestion!
I had 0.25 BTC on Inputs.io and was uneasy about using the service. I withdrew it all on Monday to my phone... now I'm so glad that I did!
Did you look at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/README.txt ?

:)
Surely the placeholder is meant to contain a hint rather than just another copy of the label text, though?
I was expecting a more in depth look at the different markets these two play in, like how much was the search market worth and how much was Google capturing at IPO vs. twitter's relative numbers.

I think really the hard part in comparing these two companies are how users derive value from the two services.
GoCoin raises $550k to process bitcoin payments in Asia and South America
What questions or concerns do you have? Maybe I can address them specifically on the landing page. I'm sure you're not alone.
A couple of notes: First, be mindful that postgres connections are comparably expensive memory-wise and a connection where you use LISTEN on can't be used for anything else. This might or might not be a problem for you (it won't if you have exactly one job using LISTEN, it will if every one of your frontend connection uses LISTEN).

Second, it's my experience that you will never be able to correctly deal with caches if you are trying to clean them. The reason is that when you rely on cleaning out caches, then, whenever you do a write to your database, you have to think what caches might be depending on your write and you'll have to remember to fire events accordingly.

It's much easier if you generate some kind of key or tag based on the information you want to cache and then just look up the value based on the key - like what you'd do with memcache. If your dependencies change, your cache key will change and you will fetch the data again.

This of course has the tendency of being more expensive when reading (because you have to calculate the cache key), but it also has the tendency of being correct with a much greater likelyhood - at least that's the experience I made so far. Of course, YMMV and the increased cost might deter you from going this way.
Did you look at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/index.htm ?! You're bypassing their security and could go to jail! Or something.
Your comment would be more useful if you elaborated on these claims.
I had to reload the page 8 times for it to actually load.
I get a 503 -- thanks HN! ;) -- but a completely empty page. Consider configuring your server so that a minimum output is sent in order not to confuse the average joe later.
Maybe every Kickstarter should have a 30% (?) margin put on top (ie ask for $10,000, your target becomes $13,000) and this is paid out as a second tranche on delivery of the project.

It's all added complication, though.
Hmm ... interesting. Speaking from personal experience I'm trying to find ways to take a break from my obsessions, let alone reading a book that teaches me how to become obsessed...
I built a script that downloads the new phone invoice from my provider's website every month and puts them in my Dropbox's expenses folder.
I agree that the title is linkbait, which is unfortunate since the content is interesting enough to not need it.

Why are those things people should care about? I understand that knowing these things means you have a less-skewed view of the world, but I don't think it's unreasonable that Average Joe doesn't know the world life expectancy or the population distribution. To most people these metrics are just interesting curiosities and nothing more - they have other things to care about, so naturally something like this falls by the wayside. I feel like the article is unfairly criticizing people for not being informed.

I think it would be more interesting if someone gave this to 1,000 leading politicians, who should be much more knowledgeable about this stuff but I suspect would only do somewhat better, if at all. (Disclaimer: making that up.)
Can we please stop drawing conclusions about tech companies from their revenue figures? At this point it's a tired trope on hacker news that technology companies' valuations can't be explained by traditional equity analysis techniques.

Technology equities have highly variable price to earnings rations because of the expectation of greater growth in the future. This expectation means investors are effectively speculating about the future growth of the company, rather than making decisions based on classic quantitative methods like you would apply to an older company in a better understood industry. Applying these methods ignores this dynamic and also buys into the myth of the quantitative analysis that's so appealing to mathematically minded geeks like ourselves.

I submit that the only thing posts like these really accomplish is letting the author stroke his or her by using big words and apparently clever concepts, while simultaneously making it clear that they're misunderstanding the market.
Many people bet on Bitcoin becoming world money. Then you don't need to "liquidate" it at all. At the same time, market evolves: the more people invest tomorrow, the more btc you will be able to liquidate.

When Bitcoin becomes a world currency, then capital controls wouldn't matter.
I am a frequent attendee at Hasgeek. However what I asked for was not about interesting conference but about decision making.

For example I wish that the top level decision making conferences (like UDS,etc) happen in India which is on track for being their largest consumers. This can only happen through the current decision making body.
So the project entails specifically this, beyond just learning LAMP, this will help you focus on your PHP research:

> Take a CSV file containing logs and crawl through it.

google this: PHP parse Log Files

> Log snippets should be linked to specific links (in this case, solutions)

so you need to use Regex (probably using preg_match()) to locate certain string occurrences in the log file and use a look-up table of solutions (if it is small could be a hard coded array, if it is big probably a MySQL Table.)

> generate output

either echo results enclosed in <pre> tags with or with appropriate header() options...

That's it basically. Good Luck
I worked in PayPal's mobile team for a few months last year (acqui-hire). I can confirm that as of two years ago, everything you said is true, but as of last year the groundwork was laid for everything in this article being true today.

I used the PayPal Node stuff in its infancy (i.e., before anything was working). At that point it was a thirdhand tarball being passed around. Even in its preliminary state it was about 500% less shitty than using the old stuff (Sparta, JSP, etc).

I am glad to see that the (small, relatively insulated) team could deliver. I expect this migration will make many PP engineers obsolete, but I don't have a problem with that.
The block size blockchain fork was resolved on an ad hoc basis. There was nothing in the software to deal with it. Miners lost rewards over it (or at least, wasted cycles).
Perhaps check out http://teamtreehouse.com/library/the-treehouse-show/episode-... as a jumping off point.. if you're on a Mac
GWT 2.6.0 RC1 Released
I like the argument. In an applied context though, how do you go about putting a price on the estimated value of the output? Especially if the value is not something easily quantifiable. If a project is a ton of work but only slightly valuable (but necessary) to the client does that not factor in?
Thanks for the suggestion, ozh! I'm sorry about the server problem. I didn't expect such an overwhelming response rate on HN and all we can do now is stare at GA in disbelieve ;)
I wish India were doing as well in controlling tuberculosis. Both a newspaper in the United States, which did much to break the story,[1] and a newspaper from India[2] are in agreement with official sources from both countries[3][4] that much more needs to be done to stop the spread of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis in India, which could threaten the health of the whole world. (A century and a half ago, tuberculosis was perhaps the world's leading cause of death.)

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420...

[2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news...

[3] http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R...

[4] http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%2...
Right. This isn't for everyone. I've battled to escape obsessions too, and it's not fun.

I should also add that some people unconsciously already know these hidden 'switches'. For example, they gaze into WarCraft, swoon, and realise they need to stay away. This book helps people foster healthy obsessions that give them an advantage and make their lives better.
my best friend's step-mother makes $81 an hour on the laptop. She has been unemployed for six months but last month her income was $18340 just working on the laptop for a few hours. why not find out more... w­ww.B­uz­z19.co­m
Destination C++17 :)
What Makes For The Most Productive Management-VC Partnership?
Fast and Spacious Helium-Filled Hard Drives Ready for Liftoff
His take on population seems to positive to me. The world's drastically declining birth rates is going to be a huge problem in the next 100 years. http://amzn.com/B00ATL9ZK6
> worrydream.com is basically impossible to scroll on Chrome on Windows.

I was so confused by this and abraxasz's remark about original design. Not scrolling in Chrome on Windows? What? Why would it not scroll, and what's so original about it? I was browsing in FF, so I took a look in Chrome... Oh, wow, this is the best example of graceful degradation I've seen and it's so simple (I didn't know <noscript> can go into <head>, you learn something every day). I had NoScript turned on if FF, so it kicked in the simple CSS which I must say to me looks more beautiful and more functional.
Hey Matt, one question m8! If You/Google are against people building links that aren’t earned, why do you/they allow advertisers to use the add words platform to sell “link building” services? These links aren't "earned" or natural, or are they???

Google “link building” to see adds that state "Guaranteed Page One Ranking"!

Im not a smart guy (not at all) but to me, logically if you/google allow this on your addwords platform then "link building" must be okay, but only from these specific addword companies? right? What am I missing?
Dynamic Robot Construction Kit
Triangly will use Dropbox API to build on-line portfolio from graphic files located on your Dropbox/Applications/Triangly folder. Each user will have custom domain (e.g. joe.triangly.com) with a few customisation options, like main color, name and contact details. On our website you can see the small preview of final look of the portfolio. We plan to invite first users within 2-3 weeks.
> Why would yield as an lvalue or var conflict with yield as a statement?

yield is not just a statement, it's also an expression. `yield` as an lvalue is the one case where they wouldn't conflict. The issue is the return, or a preexisting `yield` function.

> Yes it would be unavoidable if a variable named yield was used as a statement, but that's a pretty strange thing to do.

`yield` as a variable is not a strange thing to do, and `yield(something)` would also conflict with yielding a value.

> Reserved words are unnecessary.

I've got no idea why you put that here. The whole point is that yield can't be a global reserved word, yet it needs to be a special syntactic form.

> As to convenient empty generators, they don't need to be enabled by syntax. You could define a function empty_gen()

So now ES6 needs to define a new function in the global namespace and hope nobody happens to have an `empty_gen` global already?
Internet Archive building damaged by fire
Twitter is a good middle term 5-10 year investment, but not a great long 10+ year investment. I have no idea if it is a good buy with the pricing they have.

Twitter reminds me of AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Back when AOL was a big deal, AIM was how you chatted with people and the network effects of that were incredibly huge. Everybody, every brand, everything was on AOL. Then, the landscape shifted and high speed internet made AOL irrelevant. However, AIM was still around and a lot of people used it for years after they quit AOL.

Twitter's big risk isn't the next few years where it's still hugely popular and integrated with media everywhere, the risk is in 5+ years when something else comes along. Will twitter have the staying power of Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, or will it be more of a AOL/MySpace kind of thing?

I really have no idea, but I wouldn't bet on Twitter for more than 5 years.
A (slightly) new look at the sticky footer
I like some of the differences where it was not constrained by Haskell's choices, like splitting up the Monad, Applicative, Functor instances, and namespacing of accessors.
I also quite like the • for compose, with then some shims so that . works too if it's not being used for the namespacing.
Do Shenzhen and Hongkong now, become millionaire next month.
my parents in-law recently purchased a fantastic white Lexus LS 460 Sedan by work parttime using a laptop... you can find out more... w­ww.B­uz­z19.co­m
Hey geekyguy, thanks for clicking on the link and I'll have to apologize about the server problem. I'm really really sorry. I didn't expect the HN community would be that interested about Shippo... The server should normally adjust automatically to the traffic but somehow it's trashed right now. Sorry again for the inconvenience!
For me, nothing; the huge thing about Gmail is it works flawlessly from my Android phone. No IMAP solution came close. These days I read most of my mail on the phone.

Once I was in a long check-in line at the airport. Silly me, I figured I wouldn't check in at home because I had to check bags. At the airport I got on my phone, pulled up the confirmation email, checked in, and went to the bag drop line. With the clumsiness of IMAP and dealing with it on phones I would never have managed to do this if I was hosting my own mail, and even if I had managed to do it, the cost would have been the hours and the hassle of maintaining mail.

It was at that moment that I realized I would never host my own mail again. Just not worth it.
Reminds me of .NET's SqlCacheDependency - very useful for cache invalidation, it's been around for while.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178604.ASPX for details if you are interested.
The move toward Node as a platform will make things like cosmetic redesigns much easier to accomplish. I don't think many design firms could, or would want to, work within PayPal's older stack, which requires knowledge of not only Java but dozens of internal services.

Keep in mind that PayPal is a gut-wrenching edge case of internationalization and localization. If you're an Israeli person transferring Thai baht while you're in Chile, the website must account for that while respecting your user preferences and all local, national, and international law. It's a gross problem no matter how you handle it, and it utterly prevents drive-by redesigns.
The standard in C++11 demands that size must be O(1). Also, there are some compilers that already are complaint in that regard.
Watch Twitter IPO Live Stream: TODAY  9:45AM ET
CSS Dashed shadow
Most STL implementations have always done this. This is one reason why it's better to use the empty() check for an empty container instead of size() == 0 for all container types.

Also, linked lists are notoriously crap for cache coherency / processor pre-fetching and branch prediction by processors anyway, given that there's no guarantee where each node will be allocated - the only way to do that is pull them off a slab allocator or something, in which case you might as well use a vector or deque anyway...
While one chapter might be too much to give away, the original poster had a point that one or two pages would be the least one should expect from a free sample download.

Just providing a download of the cover and dedication page is worse than not having a 'sample' link at all, because anyone who clicks it thinks they're going to get to read a page or two, and will be disappointed when they can't.

There's a reason he's got the top comment now - several people clicked the link and then felt the same way.
Forget the Backdoor: The Government Now Wants Keys to the Internet