skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think people are really criticizing Microsoft for image-mongering as such. I think they're getting nailed for the clumsiness of their recent attempts (like the puke ad) to outsource the development of a happening-new-image that has no connection to who or what they really are, and just sort of plaster it on and hope that anyone will be fooled by it.

Sure, corporate images are idealized and sanitized and in that sense false, but the better ones still stem from the underlying reality. Is Google purely benign? Hardly, yet "don't be evil" does express something real in their culture. Are Apple and their users members of a superior race? Hardly, yet they have produced superior designs.

Microsoft's problem is that their truly distinctive quality over the years -- their competitive ruthlessness -- doesn't lend itself to positive marketing. A campaign based on something like "We screw people. Hey, it's just business." isn't likely to win favor. Maybe it says something about Microsoft that they have trouble finding a positive image that isn't an obvious marketing concoction.
What does Climate Model output look like? It looks like the same stuff that phd assembled equity market models spit out. A bunch of fancy math with no useful track record of success. When are these people going to have their LTCM public depantsing moment?
Which unspoken truths are those? That the author has a problem with the idea of anal sex? That he (for reference: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/147/423037071_85d564748a.jpg) thinks the interviewee has stereotypical facial hair?
I think that you're not properly distinguishing between the article and the blog as a whole. Every HN member who read this article saw "microspotting" in the URL and knew that it was associated with Microsoft (or a rabid fan). We took that into account when voting.

In any case, no matter how astroturf-y the original article was, it does not justify voting this one up.
Rule #1: Test, test and test.

That's one thing I've learned from my experience with landing pages. You should assume little. Test a lot.
I'm really curious about the whole "karma" concept, so don't take my question as an attack. Is a meaningless number so important to you that you would value it over knowledge? It seems you were almost on the edge of not asking simply because you thought you might be downvoted.
Yes, it's interesting how the maneuvers by the Porsche folks that led up to this were considered acts of sheer genius just a few months ago. Though the more responsible of pundits pointed out what a risk they were taking by leveraging themselves so deeply in order to manipulate the market in this way.
Not really Mossberg; a satirical puppet. Not about Twitter; about Chrome OS. So two strikes for a deceptive headline.

I found this funny when I was referred to it a week ago -- but I'm still disappointed to see it here. There are enough sources of irreverent videos; can't there be one place that's for Hacker News?
Is this your argument?

Entrepreneurship is good. PR is necessary for entrepreneurship. Astroturfing is a PR tactic. Therefore this tactic is good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_undistributed_mi...
I agree that it's small and I am not convinced by the circular projection either. I was posting that myself.

But what do you mean for "no scale"?

Each slice is scaled according to the number of listeners and the color gives another dimension (tracks 'loved' by the users).
That's the same as griping over advertising. While I don't know the true motivation of the post, it certainly can be viewed as a form of advertising, advertising for employment within Microsoft. "Hey! Look how great it is to work here. People can achieve things no matter where they come from."
Jeremy Clarkson will be so vindicated.
No. If anything, the comment was more along the lines of how ironic I find it that people bash Microsoft for doing many of the same things they themselves do.
California is bankrupt because of out of control government spending and bureaucracy costs. The "majority" is at fault to the extent they have tended to vote themselves a free lunch. But the problem is primarily parasitic special interests in and around the government, so your parallel doesn't really work.
If you can point to more than one metaphor in my previous comment, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

I stand by what I said. Calling my comment the product of a markov bot is cute in a reddit sort of way, but I wish that people would comment on the content, rather than the delivery.

I acknowledge that, regardless of whether they are the most succinct way to an express an idea, I may fail the occasional Turing test if I use too many buzzwords in one place.
As for this particular attempt at satire, I think it hit the target in a few places (in terms of nailing what's going on behind the original propaganda), and the rest of it reads like pretty much every other Zed Shaw blog post

Zed's no Mark Twain.
He took something that was almost a perfect self-parody and then made it less funny. When I read his version I get the same uneasy feeling I get when I worked with some guys from Long Island that would download Howard Stern episodes and listen to them on repeat all day. I wonder why he bothered to expend any energy on this. It's like making fun of retarded people.
The whole point of karma is to have meaning and to discourage users from posting a certain type of comment or question. Googling just "PoC" or "software PoC" pretty immediately answers his question - my guess is this is why the downvotes happened last time. I probably wouldn't downvote a question like this, but I can see why others would discourage it.
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Can Your Brain Fight Fatigue?
I can understand that, but it's just a number. My opinion of someone is not going to be any different if their karma is 1 versus 10000. Why would someone worry about that when they have a legitimate question that they want answered? The only thing I use karma for is to decide if something is worth reading. Chances are that if it has been voted up highly it's probably worth reading.
That is the kind of stuff that I hoped to hear when I posed my question! If you could elaborate on that then I'd be most interested and grateful...
Are you unfamiliar with the usage of wrong, as in bad; morally wrong, unhealthy and pernicious?

As a matter of fact I did go to college. That does not mean that I had my conscience removed. It also means that I can debate someone without resort to vituperation.

You said:
"""Again, this is like talking about the myth of gravity after a rock falls on your head. Fiduciary responsibility is the law under which corporations like publishers operate."""

Fiduciary responsibility is considered to be breached when the officers of the corporation place the assets of the corporation at risk by violating the law; is that not so?

Allow me to state a hypothetical, you are the CEO or a board member of a company and one of your direct reports brings you a plan that would involve selling lollypops with a physiologically addictive additive to young children. He presents complete documentation that no one will be harmed unless they stop consuming the product and provides an assurance that an industry consortium can have this additive declared legal before the product is marketed. He also presents projections that make it obvious that this would be the most profitable undertaking the company could do at this time.

So this plan would be legal and profitable.

Would it be morally correct? Obviously not.

Would you do this?

It is in the narrow sense you have described what you must do to fulfill your fiduciary obligations. It is also blatantly unethical.

I look forward to hearing your answer.
It doesn't help that: State Tax Revenues at Record Low

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/us/18states.html?_r=1
1 IP != 1 user.

Even if it is always the same for the same user it could be that they're behind a NAT or just simply sharing a PC.

Being behind a NAT myself I have a lot of problems with websites discriminating by IPs.
Fiduciary responsibility is considered to be breached when the officers of the corporation place the assets of the corporation at risk by violating the law; is that not so?

The problem with the term "fiduciary responsibility" is that it is a vague term that is ever changing. You don't have to violate the law to breach a fiduciary responsibility. With that said, the extent to which you are responsible for some financial matter is usually determined by the lawyer suing you and the judge overseeing your case.
Technical censorship mechanisms are agnostic as to why they are being used; the technical aspects of suppressing an illegal text are the same regardless of why that text is illegal. If we choose to create a world with very efficient technical mechanisms for censorship, we are providing governments with greater control over what information their people have access to. Some governments will use that control wisely; others will abuse it. You have to consider both sides when you are considering a technical measure like this.
Not impressed by this article, unless by "startup" you mean "pizza parlor". The stats are bogus and misleading.

Ok, so if I was in bad a mood, I'd make fun of this professor of entrepreneurship, who never enterprised anything? Pontificating about startups from a cushy desk job is one thing. Actually doing it and speaking from experience is another entirely. Sorry about the rant.
Bletchley Park Is An Awesome Experience
Not if the suggested printing of money and state bailout occurs. Inflation is sure to result somewhere down the line and then it'd be the total opposite.
Agreed. Once unemployment hits 25%, we'll be in the great depression territory (we might be there already)

Broader Unemployment Rate Hit 16.5% in June

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/07/02/broader-unemployme...
Wow, gcc generates code that's incorrect unless memory protection is being enforced? I didn't even realize it would be possible to build a kernel that way.
This is no where near the level of severity of the Great Depression. The Great Depression saw over a quarter of the population unemployed and a large destruction of perfectly healthy companies, a quantity of which we have come nowhere near.

EDIT: On top of the Crash of 1929, agricultural conditions in the Midwest of the United States greatly added to the problems.
Wiki OS
The idea is fine. It's the implementation that makes it seem like a parody.

I honestly did have to check whois. When I first saw this, I thought it was someone making fun of Microsoft.

The ironic thing is, if it had been a parody, I'd have killed it, because it was (or would have been) so heavy handed. But since it's really from Microsoft, it's on-topic, because it's an interesting data point about how completely the company has lost its way.
You don't _have_ to leave a tip. People don't appreciate it, and if you get not-bad service you should tip adequately, but the tip is a mechanism designed to encourage servers to meet your needs as well as possible, and not neglect their patrons. I think they work well, generally. In most places, a tip is not mandatory (I have heard of some establishments banning frequent non-tippers), though you generally leave one anyway to gauge the server's performance. i.e., bad performance gets 5-10%, normal 10-20%, awesome 20%+.
Onboard spatula to cope with the aftermath of crashing.
Going for the shock is cheap. It's possible to do satire without going for the shock.
Spiteful? Really? You think Apple as a company acts out of a bitter, vicious, unreasoning desire for revenge? I think closing security holes and protecting IP both sound like far more reasonable motivations.

Love to see evidence to the contrary, though. It's sure to be juicy stuff.
I have a background in finance. I know about the current methodologies for counting unemployment and any other economic indicator.

I think you can only safely say we are in Great Depression territory when you start to see food lines.
Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) has a good rep on OS X, though I guess by your Notepad++ choice you’re on Windows? If you scroll down on Scrivener’s links page there’s a bunch of Windows-based writing software that the author recommends, so it might be worth looking through those?

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.html
<quote>That MS site is embarrassing to even look at.</quote>

I am just appalled that they believe that people who are ostensibly targeted by this campaign are that unsophisticated.

Maybe they are. Go Zed, your humor makes me happy.
Actually, there's something that could happen....hyperinflation. That occurs when people lose faith in the currency, and the dollar's worth crashes (People doubt US's ability to pay back its debt)
Microsoft, in the pursuit of rebuilding their image, needs to lie. MS can not be all things to all people. I'm not trying to sound cynical, but Microsoft doesn't need to worry about actually satisfying what people want. MS only needs to make a profit. That's business, and profit is a very powerful mantra.

The response, which is the subject of this thread, get's some things right, some wrong. I don't really care too much. I just love the internet, and the free speech that it enables, encourages the public to respond to the company bullhorn, and have their own voice.
"which this seems to be a clear-cut case of (of course, I am not a lawyer and have no idea what those terms actually mean)"

Fixed that for you.
Articles like this have me nodding 'yes, yes, yup, sure, yes' while I'm reading them. But by now it's just too easy to write them.

What I'd like in such articles is some root-cause analysis and at least a few pointers on how to proceed.
Are m3u files enough? Or do you actually want things like smart playlists?

Because I think everyone supports m3us as well. I recognize other people use their computers differently. I'm just kind of disappointed that so many things are bound up in proprietary databases or formats.
Reddit's huge missed opportunity:  unifying social news with blogging
You could try to make this work in the current design:

* create a subreddit for your "blog"

* others can subscribe to your subreddit and/or make you their friend

* others can submit links to your subreddit posts in other subreddits

While it can be done, it certainly isn't encouraged and might be considered spam.

Moreover, to make this work better, all link submissions to your posts should share the same comments. These link submissions would be more like symbolic links in a file system.

UPDATE: Instead of creating a subreddit for your blog, reddit could make it so you can make submissions that go nowhere initially but they would still be associated with you. Others can then link to your submissions in subreddits.
I think the deflationary pressures from the economic collapse are largely offsetting inflationary pressures. I'm not an American, but that's why I'm not too concerned about the fiscal stimulus your country has enacted. I suspect we'll see a lot of see-sawing of monthly inflation in positive and negative directions for the next year. Say what you will about the massive numbers been thrown around by these bailouts; they're a fraction of the numbers they're trying to offset. Moreover, China will prevent the U.S. federal government from keeping the taps open too long. Because of this, I'm not buying into the notion that we'll see explosive inflation in the next few years.
The people who spent on credit were the bright ones. There is no way that we are going to get out of this without substantial debt moratoriums. Debt servicing is just too big a fraction of the economy.

The debt moratoriums will be either explicit or implicit (massive inflation).

Creditors will lose out and debtors will win big. Assets are probably overvalued, so there will be some deflation there.
That was the original purpose of the merger between Reddit and Infogami, back in 2006. Still possibly a reasonable idea, though that time it spectacularly failed to work out.
But will that get you into a software engineer position?

Of course, that might not get you into a software engineer position at Microsoft anymore, either.
Yup, Peopleware. That's what I get for ignoring the "time for sleep" clue.
Shadowstats puts the current unemployment rate at over 20%: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data. We don't yet know which is worse. The worst of the current downturn may be yet to come.
At least the banks are back in business, which is unfortunately essential to recovery. First order of business is to force them to severely lower their margins. Mortgage rates need to be heavily regulated to prevent further disasters on the housing market. Wall street needs to be regulated into oblivion. As long as they can afford to give out a single bonus they can handle more regulation to stabilize the system.

To be honest, I think the recovery will be surprisingly fast. Economic cycles are not what they used to be. At this point in history our economic infrastructure has become so sophisticated that within no time you will have an dramatic amount of new business starting to carry the weight of the economy.

It's like a forest fire. First there is the pain, then there is the barren wasteland, but then you see the new light opens up the seeds and the ashes of the old forest feed the young trees. A new forest appears in no time.
Actually I believe:

There is inflation in things you need (gas, food, energy, utilities) and deflation in things you want (luxury items, car, house)
Didn't find it very funny.

Did they just pick Mossberg's name out of a hat? Because his review of the Chrome Browser was pretty positive(http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080902/first-test-of-googles-n...). He even says "That move might one day make Chrome a sort of online operating system that competes with Windows". So having a puppet of him bash Michael Arrington for the same views makes me think the creators had no real insight into Mossberg as a character.

(that kind of insight is the whole reason why similar videos from 1938media ARE funny)

Also, just on a style point, if you think referring to blowjobs in various ways is in itself inherently funny you probably don't know what funny is.
Oh, so there are supposed to be results.

In Safari and FF, I complete the texts, the gates stop, and it sits on an empty road.
Why We Must Ration Health Care
How to build a Firefox extension
Anecdote time: I have a friend at Google who started there as basically a glorified tech while he was attending a community college (so, no degree at all). Google has been paying for large chunks of his tuition, enabling him to scrape together enough money to go to UC Berkeley. He recently graduated, and simultaneously shifted from his technician position into engineering based on feedback from the engineers he worked with.

Mind you, it took him a pretty long time to do so, and lots of things could have gone wrong on the way, but its definitely possible.
Synthetic Biology Pathway to Molecular Manufacturing?
This 'OS' has a pre-requisite, you have to visit using windows.
Windows only though. I don't have windows. I'll try that once plugin support works in Linux. Thanks.
Too expensive. Remember, the chips don't do anything useful, they are there so the government can look like it is somehow stopping terrorism with amazing high-tech gadgets.

The 9/11 hijackers had valid passports and visas.
actually it's already happening:

Southwest Florida food pantries in need as supplies run low
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/jul/02/southwest-florida...

Sacramento police are shutting down a new homeless tent city
http://www.capradio.org/articles/articledetail.aspx?articlei...
And Here Come the Aliens -- Storytelling in Games
At least here in Canada, the following was just reported by the government:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/subjects-sujets/cpi-ipc/cpi-ipc-eng...

DEFLATION:

-Shelter

-Clothing, footwear

-Transportation

INFLATION:

-Food

-Household furnishings/equipment

-Health and personal care

-Recreation, education, reading

-Alcohol and tobacco

So it's not as clear cut (at least here in Canada over the last year) as necessities seeing their prices go up with luxury items seeing them fall.
The startup landscape seems to mimic evolution in the natural world. You get a somewhat reasonable result but not one that is optimal by any means.
There's always evidence to support a view if you are willing to look hard enough, but one or two instances are not enough to support the claim that we are in a situation similar to the Great Depression. For those who take things a little too literally, perhaps I should have wrote: "... when you start to see food lines all over the country/world."
supposedly those huge 1 page landing pages convert like gold.
Your description of the 'discouraged' category is incorrect; it has nothing to do with the length of time someone is unemployed, but whether they give up looking.
I don't really understand why governments are so obsessive about associating a photograph and a name. I can change my name whenever I want, for no reason at all. I can show up at the DMV with trivially-forged documents and get an ID card saying I am whoever I want to be. I can show up in a random country and easily overstay my visa. I can be a nice person one day, and the next day kill 3,000 people.

So I don't really see what all this scrutiny about identity documents is about. Identity is something that constantly changes, and doesn't really mean anything.
Unemployment will likely go higher from here. I'll give you that as history has shown that it is likely for unemployment to rise even after the worst is over, but we're certainly on the upswing now. I wouldn't be surprised if the NBER comes out sometime later this year and says that the recession officially ended in the Q2.
Had a number of people try this, and it doesn't work.. well it freezes up the browser for a minute or two, but then FF catches it and lets you stop it.
Fighting Global Warming with Pavement
Were we smarter 100 years ago?
Agreed, but I bet the masses still believes we're in recovery, because that's what the news media have them believe. Look at all the 'recovery' headlines on the major financial news portals and you'll see.

Geithner Sees Evidence of a Financial Recovery
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/economy/17geithne...

Summers Says U.S. ‘Close to a Level Path’ to Recovery
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=antm...

Fed's Hoenig says U.S. recovery to be very slow
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE56D6CK20090714
Not to be too dismissive of the causes of the problem, but I think when you get to problems of this size and complexity there's rarely "a" root cause -- you're either stuck with one phrase low intellectual effort summaries ("greed", "stupid people") or endless finger-pointing and circular reasoning (the crap the cable news channels and talk radio like to fill hour upon hour with).

I'm proceeding by living my life. I took a loss on my house when I sold it, not primarily because of economic concern, but largely because it was time to move elsewhere (having kids etc). I have a manageable debt, mitigation strategies if that debt becomes undesirable, am not against taking on more if it becomes more desirable. My intent is to diversify into markets that may go contrary to the general economy (particularly petroleum).

I don't think anybody knows what to do. The events of the time remind me of yesteryear's disasters -- the pundits don't have anything to say, but the tape is rolling so they're talking.
From the article: "Under the deal, the Porsche and Piëch families, Porsche's shareholders, would obtain 50 percent of the shares in the merged VW-Porsche company."

Interesting form of acquisition.
I consume financial and economic news like it's going out of style. The majority of the press is still reluctant to claim we are now in recovery. I'm convinced that the only person the media will believe about being in a recovery is Roubini, and he didn't get his moniker for nothing.