skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the article is very badly written, for example, what does it mean to be a 'complex company'? There's very little actual content to this article, essentially boiling down to a matter of focus and applying the whole company to a problem. However, this isn't a particularly good point since that's exactly what MSFT did when they realized that the internet was a pretty good idea after all (remember Netscape).

Personally I think that all these threads about the death of MSFT are completely off base. They represent a minority (myself included) that have largely 'moved on' from MSFT. The last time I used a product from MSFT was a long long time ago. However, that doesn't mean much because I, and many others on HN, live in a bubble that is very much not representative of the rest of the USA, or the world.

They all have their ups and downs and right now, thanks to the overly aggressive control of their iPhone platform, Apple's the bad guy right now, but that shifts with the wind. I have many apple products, but I stick with my blackberry because its a better platform for my smartphone needs, doesn't mean I won't buy Snow Leopard, or another MacBook or iPad, or whatever.

So called journalists have been playing the X vs Y company game for decades... This is just more of that ilk.
People that blame an amorphous faceless other named "industry" always make me suspicious - suspicious that they're morons. The output of "industry" is things we, the people, use directly or indirectly. Saying that 90% of water is not used by humans, but rather used by "industry", is a mischievous and deceitful fallacy; we use that water by consuming the output of industry.

By taxing industry's use of things we'd rather "they" use less of, and taxing industry's output of things we'd rather "they" create less of (such as pollution, CO2, etc.), we are actually taxing ourselves: these taxes will increase the cost of those outputs of industry which use and produce more of what we want them to use and produce less of. By embedding the harmful effects in the price system, we can alter the balance of supply and demand and shape industry to where we want it to go, not because it's punishing "industry", but because it's punishing individuals, i.e. people like us.
It's not nearly as full featured as concentrate, but see also Freedom (also for Mac): http://macfreedom.com/
If you were making an app store, what would the rules be?
I think the app store model is a very good one, not just for phones, but for most any sort of general-purpose consumer computing device. To have every application on the system, as well as the OS itself under a common installation/update mechanism along with a repository of software known to be non-malicious would be... a lot like a modern Linux distribution, actually. Of course, Linux distributions lack a mechanism for buying software, and many find the idea of doing so abhorrent.

If you were in charge of the app store for some new platform, be it a netbook, tablet, phone or something not yet invented, what rules would you put in place? We're all aware of the problems with Apple's approach, but we have no shining example to point to and say "that's the way".
And exactly how easy would that be under VisualStudio (object of the original complaint about NetBeans being too difficult to set up)?
Things like driving small cars and using less electricity do make a difference in the aggregate. But they usually happen because industry has been taxed, one way or another - either through government or scarce resources - so that the price signals in the economy change, and big cars, electricity, etc. become more expensive and we buy less of them.
Where Is Xu Zhiyong?
Environmentalism is a religion, no doubt about it. The full extent of my involvement and support is in raising taxes for things we want industry to produce and consume less of, period. Price signals in the economy will do the rest of the work. Piety not necessary.
This is true, but I was specifically addressing the case where a "spiteful" agent attempts to guess high and throw off the average, and just pointing out that this would actually hurt no one but the spiteful agent himself.
Using force to extort people usually ends badly, except for dictators at the top of the chain. You will never find security in weapons.
Some rules that come to mind for me are:

* Apps must not alter data they did not create without explicit permission from the user.

* Apps must not cause advertising to be displayed outside of their own UI or when not in the foreground (the meaning of which depends on the platform's UI).

* Apps must not alter data on other devices without explicit permission from the user of the other device.

* Apps most not transmit data from the device without explicit user permission.

Some grey areas I don't know how best to handle are:

* Plugins and the like that might violate the rules despite the original app being ok.

* Agreements with third-parties (e.g. phone service providers). To what degree should it be up to the maintainer of the app store to enforce those agreements?

* Allowing installation of apps through other mechanisms.
Fresher Walk-In @  i-Net Solution Pvt Ltd: Chennai
I enjoyed this recent post from Dan Benjamin, introducing meditation:

http://hivelogic.com/articles/an-introduction-to-mindfulness...

In particular, this line:

"One final thing to keep in mind; you absolutely do not have to be a Buddhist to meditate in this way, and this practice won’t turn you into one, either."

Which isn't to knock Buddhism in the slightest, but just a reminder that it's possible and useful to consider the practice of meditation as a separate thing from the Buddhism, or mysticism, or whatever-else-ism that it's often packaged up with in popular consciousness, and which might put off some people from trying it.
folks going for interviews could explain that.
Empirically, when I wash the half dozen seagull splatters and random dirt off of my panels I can't see a difference in my power production graphs.

I'm sure the output goes up, but it is too small for me to bother with the somewhat uncomfortable chore of washing them with the mop and squeegee on a 16 foot pole.
it would have been cheaper to rewrite it.

Not necessarily. You need to think outside the cubicle.

Suppose your company has 100 customers. Each of the customers has 10 employees who are trained to use the old system, and 1 tech support guru who knows how to write handy time-saving macros using the old macro language.

If you, the programmer, rewrite the code instead of spending hours painstakingly constructing an emulation environment for it, you might save several years of your time. But your company will save the cost of:

-- Conducting retraining classes for 1000 customer employees, who may not have any interest in learning your new software. (Though you may imagine that the speed and efficiency of your software is the primary concern of your customers, this is not necessarily the case. It's just as likely that they only notice your software when it stops working the way it always did, forcing them to adapt.)

-- Conducting a more extensive set of retraining classes for the 100 tech support gurus who will need to learn an entirely new way of doing their jobs.

-- Staffing a help desk to lead people through the new software.

-- Hiring and training the trainers and the help desk employees.

-- Finding a way to convince your existing customers to pay for all this -- the training time (for which their employees will want to be paid), the temporary loss of efficiency due to the learning curve, and (of course) the fee that you're charging for the upgrade. You may need to beg and plead. You may need bribes and threats. Incidentally, all that begging, bribing, and threatening can't be automated: It needs to be done by your company's sales and support team, one phone call at a time, and those folks have to be paid too.

-- Fending off competition. A discontinuous change in a company's product line is a scary time. Because what you're asking your clients to give up (experience with your old codebase) may be exactly what has been preventing them from fleeing to your competitors. And because the moment of shipping the upgrade is not only the moment when dreams meet reality, but is also the moment when the customer gets to decide whether to spend another N years stuck with your product. An unfortunate coincidence of timing which has often led to disaster.

All of this could easily be more costly than hiring a handful of "computer-science whizzes" for a year or two of emulation-layer development. And it's why, if you are a computer-science whiz, you should raise your consulting rates. ;)
Point, but note that the editor, OS architecture, and processor are under very active development, and have been continuously improved over the past three decades, and are implemented in a language whose compiler has also kept pace with the times.

In the case of the aforementioned business, the emulator to run their existing code on an x86 was the right move, because it could buy them a ton of time to move things to a newer architecture -- it's not like COBOL doesn't exist on x86, even today (OpenCOBOL).

Moving slowly because you want to reuse a large, existing codebase with many happy customers is smart. Refusing to budge an inch because you're terrified of adapting to new market conditions... isn't.
Mini Book Review: Ruby Best Practices
Valerie has written a number of file-system articles for LWN, all of similar quality.

(and LWN is really worth supporting)
The Next Lisp: Back to the Future
That's all good, but if you read carefully you'll see I made no mention of the environment in my post, which was focused on the national security benefits to being less reliant on foreign oil.
Reminds me a lot of Logo. I think back in 1st grade computer class it was a turtle we controlled as well.

Also, in AP Comp Sci we went over the basics of functions by making a turtle move across a plane.

Why turtles?
A very enjoyable read thank you. I wonder how does it look when a programmer panics or chokes
Second that. It's really easy once all the electronic filing paperwork has been filed with the IRS and State. Also, their system is the same as Paycycle, just rebranded (I think).
I don't know the difference. What is the difference?
I believe you'll need the Plus service if you want to e-file state taxes, which runs $36/mo. Check out the "Rates & Fees" tab at: http://www.bankofamerica.com/small_business/online_banking_a...
But it seems Mark Tarver (the author) is ending his work on Qi:

http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_frm/thread/5927...
Breast Cancer and Diet - Realistic Considerations
I thought this was odd. I think they meant to say $4.99 per month with a 12 month contract, etc.

I will stick to Google Voice, which is free.
A car doesn't sound like a very good investment if you never use it. Better to use a car sharing service... although I guess those don't exist in the suburbs.
If you're working near florescents, try moving or turning them off. If you made an unlucky draw in the gene pool lottery, the fast flicker from florescents can interfere with your eyes' ability to focus, which can lead to eye strain. Taking a periodic break to stare at something distant is good. My optometrist claims that getting a 15 minute dose of indirect sunlight (looking at something outside with a blue sky background) is even better.

An eye exam will also rule out something like cataracts, which usually hit when you're a lot older, but may arrive early if you made a particularly unlucky draw from the gene pool.
Learning to Love Jetpack, Part 2
Yeah, it's directly inspired from Logo. Logo was great because you were immediately able to program, and immediately see the results on the screen. There wasn't any annoying procedures to do before you could start, no graphics packages to learn. That was my goal here -- to have as few barriers as possible between the person and the programming.

Why turtles? I don't know actually, I'm just following Logo's convention. Some implementations make it a little arrow - I prefer the turtle, especially because kids like it better. Though there isn't really a reason that a turtle should leave a trail, so maybe a slug would make more sense.
Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we've got less than 30 major products.

incredible!
I have recently been experimenting with a different method. I'm not sure taking the joy out of what you focus on is the best idea anyway.

Instead of figuring out how to set up the perfect set of variables to trigger flow (focus) for long periods of time, I do something else.

I purposely interrupt my work every 10 minutes for a long (5+ minutes) break. Most accounts I have read say that it takes 10-20 minutes to get into a state of flow to be able to do some real, hard work. But with the limitation of only 10 minutes of work, I force my brain to learn to get into flow much more quickly (definitely under 5 minutes, and I think much less but it's hard to measure!).

I only started doing this the last couple of weeks. I'm amazingly more productive, and the scope of my projects are increasingly ambitious.

I am posting this to see if anyone has had a similar experience. So, have you?
GRRM is by far my favorite fantasy author, but notoriously slow in releasing books. I wouldn't hold you breath for this release date, he's blown by release dates for this series countless times before. If you want to keep up to date with his latest, go to his not-a-blog blog:

http://grrm.livejournal.com/96953.html

He also talks about football, AGOT miniature releases, his other series, sci-fi writing awards and other authors.
Back then people didn't take issue with IE shipping with windows, but as Windows. MS tried its typical bullying tactics to squeeze out competitors. IE became so tightly integrated into Windows that it a) couldn't be removed without wrecking the OS, and b) enjoyed low-level (performance enhancing) OS access that was refused to competing browser/app makers.

So it was not silly to "squabble" over it. MS wanted to dominate the web as a proprietary platform and extension of Windows. This was a real threat back then.

You could be using "IE 5.8 service pack 14" right now, writing jscript (not javascript), MSHTML, and active-x plugins, enjoying horrific security issues exacerbated by a browser monoculture, and being treated as a second class citizen if you use any other browser than said IE 5.8, since you'd have to reverse engineer all the interfaces and get sued in the process to make active-x etc. work in competing browsers.
Firefox passes billion milestone
Astronaut Koichi Wakata didn't change underwear for a month
The reason I consider this article HN worthy is this:

"Designed to resist the rigours of lengthy space travel, the anti-static, flame-resistant, odour-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent smalls have been put through their paces as part of a project aimed at ensuring that future space travellers will need only minimal space in their suitcases."

Now imagine the myriad of different uses such underpants could have here on Earth. And? Precisely!
lol good will is dangerous? You manage to invoke Hitler from saving shower water. You can spin anything to look like its looming Fascism, but I suspect you've been reading a bit too much Erich Fromm.

I invoke Godwin's law. Wanting to save water fascist? Jesus man, get a grip. Is everything that might inconvenience you in any way a danger of fascism?

In Atlanta, we've had a drought - we use almost all our local reservoir for non-industrial use. We almost went on rationing last year. If we had more efficient appliances, we wouldn't be in such trouble. Is that fascist?
More from Mozilla: http://onebillionplusyou.com/
Jay Leno's jet-powered car
Would you please explain how driving a small car (let's take a Prius as the obvious example) has exactly the same effect on the environment as driving a gas-guzzler? I don't get it.
It's opening up in a couple of months, but they make no claims about it being ready for "prime time". In fact, I would say that they're opening it to a wider audience, but not completely open.

See http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10300445-2.html for more quotes like these:

"I would imagine in six months this will be fast, slick, stable and usable," Lars said. "Right now, you have to be a super early adopter (to use Wave). By September 30, an early adopter."

"...is making sure Wave is stable enough to accommodate 100,000 new users that will start doing the Wave after September 30, when Google opens up the limited preview to a wider audience."

They currently have a beta group of 6000, as I understand it. 100,000 isn't exactly "prime time" either.

But then, these things are subjective and open to interpretation, I suppose.
When you move to Mono, many of the auxiliary arguments for C# fall apart. (no VS.NET on Linux, "enterprise support," yadda yadda)
that isn't a good title. Given the intended audience, you can assume the readership is smart enough to understand that nuances are not reflected in the title.

Here are some examples of using your style in well known titles.

God is not Great Most of the time (worse title, but more accurate)

A failure of Capitalism to self regulate banking and insurance and avoid systemic risk (much worse than the original, but more accurate)

A pale blue dot when viewed from a distant perspective in space (much worse than the original, but more accurate)
The most epic of my chokes probably was on icfp contest of 2007. Plenty of pressure, tight deadlines (icfp contests take 72 hours). There was a hard to reproduce bug in my fast dna vm implementation, and it took me like 18 hours to find that one wrong line. I think "stuck in debugging" usually means choke.

As for panic, that's more of a sysadmin thing, imo. When a RAID fails to come back after a power failure on the production server, it does take some guts to not start making random stupid moves.
IANAL, but my understanding is that a class action involves a group of people suing at once.

What I meant though is that "sued" usually refers to a completed case in past tense. This lawsuit just started.
ITV set to offload Friends Reunited at £160m loss
They're called turtles because, back in the day, they were actual robots that looked like turtles. http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Robots/gwonline/gwonline.html
http://tipd.com - financial news

http://designfloat.com - for designers (seems to be down at the moment)
I snapshotted a picture of the data for those interested. http://jim.studt.net/solar.gif (there are some missing data sections, sorry, the data collection port has some interesting quirks).

The green line is solar panel current delivered to the 24v battery bank (actual panel voltage is several times higher). The red and yellowish lines are various inverter and telemetry loads. In the bottom half the red line is battery bank voltage and the blue is "state of charge" as indicated by the somewhat mysterious Outback DC monitor.

For the sake of cleaning differences, note that I cleaned the panels around 10am on the 11th. Compare the 9am solar output, the first faint vertical line to the left of the noon line on the 10th, 11th, and the 13th(post cleaning). All very similar, a few percent change at best.

I can't let you into the live system to browse, it has an expensive query and the intertubes would crush my server.

I really should put a legend on there.
They've been sued, they haven't yet lost the lawsuit.
I'm all for the good things in modern life, dentists, technology &c &c and I don't believe that the author is explicitly against this either.

Rather his main point was that we-the-people have been manipulated into thinking that the onus of environmental destruction is squarely upon our shoulders, as opposed to the meta-shoulders of "industry".

The whole back-to-the-land ideal is flawed and short-sighted, as he suggests making changes at the personal level is pointless if mandates at the government/global level end up being the cause of all the damage. Sweeping change is needed but of course this doens't mean stand at the barricades waving gaia flags revolution. It's just that revolution in a che-guavera/1917 fashion is far more romantic than revolution in the form of sensible change brought about by public opinion & lobbying and all that.
From what I've seen (and felt!) one might be facing a really nasty bug which has caused a sudden crash in a production environment which is holding up many hundreds of very angry customers. Some yelling may have occurred.

You know you should sit back and reason out what the problem might be (it worked before -- what's gone wrong?) but the rookie reflex is to start coding right away and to slap something -- ANYTHING! -- in that might make things right. That should make the yelling stop!

When that doesn't work, another patch is put in. Then another, and another, corrupting data and making things even worse!

...and so the cascade of 'Hail Mary' programming fixes is put in place until someone finally pulls the plug and yanks the poor, choking programmer aside for a breather.

It's rare for programmers to have a 'do or die' moment and few are prepared for or recognize it when it comes. If you ever feel the urge to rush: Don't.
Downvoted for patently unnecessary use of a URL shortener.
You can say they are being sued but they haven't yet been sued.
I agree. To build a society around gain and growth is a bad idea. Several large civilizations have fallen (think Romans etc) due to this simple mistake. Modern capitalism is heading the same way.

Society will divide into those who adapt and those who take. The latter will always fall.
The Climate Models are in Fortran
Think About This Cash For Clunkers is Congress’ Way of Saving the Auto Industry
Don’t Look Now, But Flash Is (Kind Of) Working On Chrome For Mac
Molecular Manufacturing Through the Decades
You made up the Hitler reference!

I reject your invocation of Godwin's law.
http://baseshield.com/ is a YC-funded app store for Windows that has a lot of good things going for it.

Does anybody familiar with the company know what the process for getting apps added to their library is? They’ve made such a good job of the implementation—I particularly like the fact that they use virtualisation / sandboxing to protect the host system—I’d be interested to hear what rules they have in place for app additions.
Good point. One way to measure this is by the concept of virtual water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water
Well Flash only kind of works on the rest of Macintosh browsers, so this is a good first step.
I did not bring up fascist!

I reject your rejection.

"It is quite possible that fanatical ecologism will be the great blight of the 21st century, as fanatical nationalism was the great blight of the 20th."

"Throughout history, this sort of thing has led to tyrants and other political disasters."

The connection with tyranny is so tenuous that its hilarious that its being upvoted. "People are motivated. That is dangerous."

Really says a lot about the Hacker News audience.
Apple and its iPhone have put technology funds in the spotlight again
The article isn't worrying, it's just wrong. We can easily reduce US emissions by 80% without having to destroy the industrial economy. In fact, the most pessimistic of the economic studies shows (IIRC) that cutting emissions 80% would put our economy on track to double in size by June of 2040 instead of January of 2040.

The people who think that reducing emissions means destroying the economy are just idiots. California is well on their way to doing it already, and they have by far the strongest economy of any state.
Not to discount his enthusiasm, but the sentiment reflected by his quote "There is more than one way to do it but most of them are really, really bad.” has been around for ages. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Your first paragraph made sense. I think you lost it in the IE5.8 world. Which is why you may have been down-voted.

I think the point being that removing/unbundling the browser may not be as important as making sure that users aren't only locked in to using your browser.