skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft was started to not be IBM, if they want to be IBM for sure they can bring in a guy like that.

If they want to compete with Google and Apple, they need engineering/product people, or someone that gets it and has done it.

One redeeming quality of Ballmer even though he was a metrics guy was he was there from the beginning and saw the innovation modes, even he couldn't keep it on track and missed.

So yes these guys are good CEO's quarterly, but they might miss the big waves of change simply because they are good metrics guys/quarterly guys.

Nabisco and IBM are quarterly focused companies first. IBM is doing some fun stuff with Watson but I am afraid a CEO like that will turn Microsoft into an IBM or an Oracle. If that is what the shareholders want they might have to, it isn't what developers of the platform want. What does Microsoft need more of now?
5 Offbeat Habits Of The Biggest Tech CEOs
Exactly. Google can afford a long-term strategy - but, as much as I support Google, competition is healthy for any market.
I have a copy titled 'The Art of Strategy'. The author states that the proper translation of 'bing' was 'strategy' rather than 'war'. I asked a friend from China what he thought 'bing' means and he said 'soldier' or 'war'.

I'm not sure why the author of my copy translated that way, but he did mention that the translations vary depending upon the zeitgiest of the times.

I think his idea was that war was wrong and that we should be moving to a new ideal. I agree, which I why I bought that copy, rather than the one about war.

--
X
On the surface, yes, I suppose if you use your real name you may be tempted to tone down your opinion a bit (presumably the reason why youtube switched to G+ commenting with real names, etc).

But on HN, I've actually seen the exact opposite - people with handles derived from their real names seem to make more serious, well thought-out comments. I don't know about "most controversial", but certainly the most useful, which to me is more important. (I have a made-up handle, so I'm not one of these people :)

You'll see this reflected on the HN leader board as well; I assume that - like any online discussion board - made-up handles are the majority on HN, but real-name based handles figure quite prominently there. Not sure why.
Could be argued that, when a company like Facebook acquires something like Instagram (which is itself a pretty straightforward service that wouldn't be difficult for a team of competent developers to build), they aren't really buying the app. They're buying the user base.

Anyone can build a Snapchat, but not anyone can have millions of active users.

Sorry, just had to point out my opinion that that argument isn't too relevant to the discussion.
LOL. Mission? Believe?

Is Dell a religion or a mere money making entity which works, rightly, to enrich a few owners / share holders?

Look, I like Dell. A supplier of choice for me. Always been good to do business with. I would recommend them in many cases. But come on, its a business, not a not for profit, humanitarian, charity. All this "mission", "believe" stuff is just fantasy BS to make people work harder to make the owner more money. The only question for an employee, in this regard, is: does it give me what I want or need right now? If so, then work, and work hard for your money. If not, then bugger off.

Then, the very idea that its OK for a business to be in it for the money, which is what a business is, yet that its wrong for an employee, is frankly hypocritical BS. Any one who falls for this business BS is a simpleton mug.

If you want people to actually care about the business, give them a cut of the action related to profit. Because profit is the only think that matters. No profit, no point.
A country's top concern will almost always be towards its own citizens first. I believe that is why you see even friendly countries spying on one another.
That mileage cost doesn't take into account human labor.
Right. Most of the interesting questions are complicated, because most of the genuinely simple things we all just agree on the right answer quickly and stop talking about it...
What about the worlds most pitiful one way hash function, like the nickname I'm using here which is "obviously" my initials?

Another classic in this genre is for decades I've watched the comedy of people advertising their ham radio callsign, then not realizing people can look them up, then realizing that almost no one knows how to look it up or cares, then figuring out it doesn't really matter at all. So ham radio callsigns are yet another pitiful wanna be one way hash function.
>> The NAP is a reasonably well defined moral principle.

Therein lies the problem though, even if we accept the NAP, we can never agree on what is force or violence and what is the initiation of force. Particularly where it concerns libertarian dialogue in which anything and everything can be and is construed as violence, with the bizarre exception of property rights. It's not reasonably well defined, it's vague and facile.

>> What matters is not the countless edge cases, but the general principles themselves, and most of all, whether they are rational and consistent.

Actually I value pragmatism and social utility well over consistency when it comes to my society. If a society is entirely rational based on a narrow vision of rational morality but ends up worse for the majority of people than one that is morally corrupt from top to bottom... well you'll find me in Corruptopia.

>> There is no all-encompassing, absolute, 100% objective moral system, but that's alright. Since the best we can do is "close enough", that's what we should aim for.

But we should definitely aim for one that respects your morals (property rights) over anyone else's (equal access to land, food etc) ?

>> Does anyone have the right to take someone else's property by force?

Yup, in some circumstances. For instance if your property is radioactive and near my house. There are many other exceptions as you yourself have mentioned.

>> everyone knows that punching someone in the face for no reason is wrong, and that it constitutes violence. Again, the aggressor is always in the wrong

That must be why the good guys in movies are always non-violent pacifists and never, ever punch someone in the face for saying something they don't like about their girl (for instance).

I'm sorry, but you start with an ill-defined premise (the NAP), admit there are hundreds of holes or grey areas, and then try to tell us that we should build our entire moral outlook and society on it anyway. It's rather funny really.
X.509 has a top-down security model, which has benefits in authoritative deployment scenarios but is also vulnerable to things like seen today.

Chrome's ca-chain pinning is only available for a selected group of sites, e.g. google, twitter, tor2web while everyone can get their properties into the HSTS list (doesn't help if any CA goes bad).

This hard-coded, limited list does not scale. We need a bottom-up model, that allows something like pinning or "per-certificate" trust instead of recursive CA trust. This should not only work for things like TLS but also for S/MIME.

In addition, OS and browser vendors should ask the user before some certs are trusted or at least make it very easy to untrust a lot. On OS X it's a PITA to double click every CA cert and untrust it manually.
Does anyone even know who the German president is? (Hint: it's not Angela Merkel.)

I live in Germany and I wouldn't have been able to name him.
They have been there since feb 2013 http://web.archive.org/web/20130227190135/https://www.cia.go... this year. It looks like three scenarios are possible here.

1. Someone has a time machine.

2. Weed at work

3. Fishy fishy fishy
>Only if you can get another job easily.

Maybe. If you can't get another job, that implies you are getting paid above-market wages.

If the company is in trouble and you are getting paid above market wages, how many more months is it going to be before they ask you to leave without a nice severance package?
I first tried using my real name back when blogging started (around the same time as Journaling file system buzz on Linux). It was difficult to switch gears from attention seeking.

I "lurk more" when using my real name since I try to use communities where other people are more insightful than me.

Also I noticed a common pattern of "20 questions" when I was using aliases about innocuous Questions Answered Frequently that over time eroded my confidence in my anonymity. e.g. vim versus emacs is one of the 20.
I'd put it down to where I grew up and who I grew up around. This was 2000-2002, and I grew up in Redmond, Washington. My first real Internet experience was getting a school email account, and they gave us a long series of talks about how we were supposed to use them appropriately.
The Man Who Does Not Exist tells me he is a libertarian, an Ayn Rand disciple, and, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, views himself a disrupter. Business is a zero-sum game...

It would be so nice if journalists who write about "Ayn Rand disciples" would actually read something by her first, so they would know what they're talking about.
After I had not programmed for about a year and a half, I saw someone use Computercraft - a Minecraft mod. Now Lua is my most preferred language and I have been using it for about two years.
Right. You could also convert a pointer to a uintptr_t, XOR it with some value, then at some later point XOR it again to get back the original address and cast it back to a pointer and dereference it, and it would be legal despite breaking GC. However, a number of things that also break GC, like your first example, also happen not to be legal C even though they'll probably work on any existing implementation.
This looks like it should maybe be an ask HN post.
Objective-C has pointers and a GC.
> "I don't know of any language that has pointers and a GC. Are there any?"

Objective-C used to have a garbage collector, though (at least with regards to iOS) Apple removed this capability with the introduction or ARC. On the following URL is some discussion on the Objective-C garbage collector: http://cocoasamurai.blogspot.nl/2010/12/objective-c-memory-m...
Sounds fantastic. It should be possible to secure a site with something that can be taken offline and stored with physical security.
That's TACK.
When I joined the internet, there was Usenet. And Usenet etiquette (at least for de.* which is what I had to restrain myself to due to the general lack of English) required you to provide a real name, so that's what I've done.

This made me much less reluctant to use my real name later on.

However, just as my real name, my pseudonym also stuck and I try to get it whenever I sign up for a service. That way I'm twitter.com/pilif, github.com/pilif, even facebook.com/pilif, though I don't use that.

Unfortunately, on G+, I can't be /pilif. I have to be pilif123459 or whatever. Too bad.
>> Generally, improvements and occupation make it your home. Somebody coming in to take land containing a house you built, a barn you raised, cattle you bred on a crop you are growing, are taking what's yours.

So nobody should be able to own land they aren't using for anything and I should be able to just go and occupy it? Cool.

>> Take this away and nobody would use land at all. Been done in history again and again; result always the same : collapse of farming, which means collapse of the govt.

And now we've moved onto a pragmatic rather than moral absolutist argument, which I agree with entirely.

Now that we're in this territory, let's talk about a bunch of other human-friendly pragmatic moves we could make as a society that might improve everyone's lives, eh?
However, the most effective way to learn is to make bold statements based on your current level of understanding and wait for people to correct your errors. Sometimes you even need to play devil's advocate to properly model the information in your head.

Our great folly as humans is in assuming statements connected to names actually mean anything.
It works fine as long as you have enough type information to know what is and is not a pointer.
Why not a wedge of cash to stay? That's what happened in one business I worked in but got bought out like this.

We got told things would change, they needed our co-operation, it would mean possibly working a bit harder and getting used to new practices. So, here's a lump sum.

BTW, only a very small number took the money and left afterwards. Problem they had was that in the industry, the deal was well known. Apparently interviews for some other firms in the same sector were awkward. "So, Mr Smith, you took the hand out a month ago, but here you are interviewing for us. Please tell us your opinions on loyalty?"
It would be awesome if companies like Google would calculate MTBF statistics on components. They've done it for disks and it would be great to extend it to CPUs and memory modules. They're probably in a better position than even Intel to calculate these things with precision.
"If I offer the dollars, it can't compel me to produce another car or give you a piece of my house instead."

Sure, but if you cannot (or simply do not) pay your creditors with dollars, the courts can give them a (figurative) piece of your house/car/computer/etc.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lien
Ask HN: Lobste.rs invites?
Anyone have an invite they can spare? E-mail in my profile.

Cheers.
Open web video conferencing with Jitsi Videobridge, XMPP and COLIBRI.  Enjoy ;)
A sample video demonstrating open web video conferencing with Jitsi Videobridge, XMPP and COLIBRI.
Or a mobile pictogram, smaller than the gesture itself.
Of those top three, only Newell really has experience running a company, and his company is structured radically differently than Microsoft's (Ignoring the wildly different scales of the two companies, Valve has a vaguely non-hierarchical lattice-like organizational structure. I would not count on those CEO skills being transferable.) Linus can obviously manage a large project, but that in no way makes him a good fit for being the Microsoft CEO.

I don't know much about the non-top three suggestions there, but the ludicious choices for the top three make me inclined to doubt them.
It looks like the second is still valid C, but a C++11 compiler is allowed to break it if it declares "strict pointer safety" rules are in effect at runtime (which a GC implementation would presumably do)
Yeah Dejanews was a bit of a shock to many of us.
It is somehow relevant and was interesting to learn about state "nullification".

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/03/some-nsa-oppo...
> Tea Party are stridently making cases that African Americans are sub-human[1];

Your reference [1] makes no reference to the Tea Party.
Also, I don't know how good you guys are as lawyers but really you should emphasize the hell out of that more: connect to avvo reviews, background information. Right now, the site looks like a DIY guide to the green card. While that may be the intention, you should probably rejig it such that the lawyer bit gets emphasized.

It also depends on your target demographic. If your target demographic is nice clean cases of U.S. citizens sponsoring their wives or whatever, then I think you are good. If not, make it look more "lawyery" will only help.
This assumes the purpose of the internet is trolling and confrontation. If you feel like my mom is watching us talk about Scala programming, the only relevance is she'd be bored out of her skull (its not her kinda thing)
The expenses-scandal stories came from the Telegraph.
My Firefox 26 on OSX doesn't list Diginotar any more. Neither does the OSX Keychain and by that extension Safari and Chrome. They might have been slow to remove it, but it's gone now. (Edit: here's the link to the firefox bug where they've removed the root: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682927) seems to have been removed all the way to Firefox 6 even.

Have you manually added Diginotar back? Has some malware added Diginotar back?
Edit: I agree this thread contains a lot of negativity and I agree it's too early to make any calls on this particular game, which does look fantastic.

Since so little can be said of this game the discussion is more "why have so many tried to do this, and failed"?

So I'll try:

Why is "procedural" used as a sales pitch? The only thing cool about procedural is that you can make something extremely vast. But then "vast" should be the sales pitch!

I'd much rather buy a game that promised "ten thousand planets carefully modeled by artists", than a game that contains millions of random ones. I fact, I'd probably prefer a sim with a designed world much smaller than that.

The thing with procedural environments is that they leave everything to game mechanics. A well designed world can support a basic or boring mechanic (such as a linear shooter). Procedural worlds need a game mechanic so deep and brilliant that only very few games have managed it (minecraft and a few of its inspirations, for example).

There isn't much that can be said about mechanics from the trailer, so we'll see.

I think (sadly) it will be the prettiest in a long line of "let's make an elite style universe sim where the game mechanic will probably/hopefully emerge from the sheer awesomeness that is an enormous space sim".
They can hire me as CEO. I would welcome Bill on the Board. I think things went downhill when he stopped being CEO.

When I was at Microsoft I got along well with Bill, I did not get along with Steve. Before I was at Microsoft it was the opposite. Steve and I got along well and Bill and I bumped heads.

Afterwards I figured out why. Steve cares about doing things. As long as you are working he is happy. Bill cares about doing the right things. He will sit for 2 hours and think before acting. When I was young this didn't work for me. I couldn't understand, it seemed like doing something was better than doing nothing. But now as I am older I get it.

I think Bill was often ahead of his time because he would do the right thing and hope others would catch up. Steve would do the thing people wanted and always be behind.
> It took government A BILLION DOLLARS just to make a website that the private sector could have delivered for A THOUSAND TIMES less money and in a third of the time

Source? AFAIK not even the craziest right-wing conspiracy blog out there claims healthcare.gov cost a billion dollars to create.

The Washington Post has the best reporting on it so far. It puts the figure for the website development and support itself at $174M and casts doubt on the wildest one out there ($600M). Also, there are significant costs on the IRS side of things that by definition couldn't be delivered by the private sector.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/11/...
If he has the attitude that "the law applies to other people, but not to me", he might very well be a sociopath.

And if you think that insider trading is a serious crime, why shouldn't tax evasion (he doesn't pay NYC hotel tax), which deprives needy people of city services or causes law-abiding people to pay higher taxes, be a real crime?
I was already building a reply to that. What it seems to boil down to is "I know that I can't define my terms and I know that we don't agree about morality but god-dammit my one moral principle should still be the basis of everything".

Needless to say, I disagree.
I don't think it is fair to boycott the Olympics and rob the dreams of the participants who worked so hard to qualify.

If you have something to prove, then prove it at the Olympics. Use it as an opportunity to change people's perceptions.

Could you imagine what was going through Adolf Hitler's mind when he saw Jeese Owens during the 1936 Olympics? Or, back in the US, where racism was commonplace and African-Americans were treated as "inferior".

Interesting fact about Jeese Owens: He was never acknowledged for his achievements until President Dwight Eisenhower.
Elop was put at Nokia to see how he would do as a CEO.

He isn't really in the running anymore because he and Bill disagree on focus.

Bill says Microsoft is about the connected home. Elop says it should be about the Connected Business.

Elop doesn't want Xbox, or Music.

Bill wants Xbox, Media Center, more movies, and an Answer to YouTube.
Silicon Chasm
> It's a difficult idea to wrap your head around, I know. The government can invest tax dollars, but so can you. Taxation, regardless of what it is spent on is inherently zero-sum by definition.

I think you're defining taxation so narrowly as to be meaningless. One could equally argue that buying something in a shop is inherently zero-sum - your money goes to the shopkeeper, the product goes to you, by definition that's zero-sum.

With more usual definitions we'd say that was a positive-sum trade, because to you the product is worth more than the money, while to the shopkeeper the reverse is true. But the exact same reasoning can apply to taxation - taxation is positive-sum for most people, precisely because it is more valuable to them for that money to be in the hands of the government than for it to be in their own hands (because, as you say, the government can use it more efficiently, because it can undertake projects that while positive-sum are impractical for private individuals).
Well, pretty much any language with a GC can abuse the GC, regardless of whether it's optional or designed in from the start. It just happens to be a lot harder to abuse a GC than to forget to free/delete something.
> If you want people to actually care about the business, give them a cut of the action related to profit. Because profit is the only think that matters. No profit, no point.

Hear hear.
So every once in a while I come across old timey C optimizations in the spirit of Duff's device or bit twiddling to swap variables, 'etc 'etc...

While they have a certain kind of charm to them they seem to be almost universally bested by increasingly mature compilers and complex (or virtualized) hardware.

So I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that clever pointer arithmetic games and even manual malloc/free are increasingly futile unless you're targeting embedded devices. If a young language like Go gets you at least in the same ballpark as C with a relatively immature GC and even toy implementations like the OP take you rather far these days... when is coding without a garbage collector even really defensible anymore?

I'm not trolling. I think pointer arithmetic is neat and the aforementioned "optimizations" are magical and possibly my generation has missed out on something wonderful. Seems it just isn't often practical to do that sort of thing anymore.

Edit: I'd like to stress that I wasn't talking in absolutes, and asking rather than telling. I'm not sure how to phrase my post better, made some edits nonetheless.
That's what I said. My point was that libertarians assume there is inherent justice in this situation. I don't.
Using your real name makes the inevitable online abuse harder to take. It feel more real. Using something else makes it seem more abstract, its easier to handle such abuse.

I only use my real name when I have to, buying on line and government services for example.
Why I Started Wallaby
I'm almost sure that the components without moving parts will become technologically obsolete long before they start to fail. When I buy used laptop I always change the HDD, the DVD and its reliability jumps sharply up.
Try checking the version of ghc you have installed.
> If you thought you had to work more after the first round of layoffs, boy howdy; after round two, you might as well park your cot in the office. Worse, in round 2 and 3 the severance packages get smaller and smaller.

Because the people who are left are stupider and more desperate for a job.
That's probably because he doesn't have any real power :)
Now THIS is the kind of articles I want to see in HN.

Saved for later reading, seems very interesting and well explained.