skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He is not a sales guy, that's clear. However, having a geeky technologist than sales person as the boss is always a morale booster to technology company.

This could well be a strong sign that Microsoft future focus would be hardly in consumer market, given the choice of CEO.
I noticed the following sentence in Balmer's email to employees (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/feb14/02-04ma...):

I love the breadth and the diversity of all of the customers we empower, from students in the classroom to consumers to small businesses to governments to the largest enterprises.

It's interesting to see the governments standing between small businesses and large enterprises in the minds of such men.
A great book, whose only downside is using AT&T syntax.
A lack of customer support is typical these days. The problem is that outsourcing to India doesn't work out and US work is too expensive.
This is really similar to a thread that made the top of HN a couple months ago about the guy who was having problems with CoinBase (and couldn't get any support) which was never deleted [1]. It was successful in causing enough of a riot to get the CEO involved [2]. When dealing with lots of money and useless customer support, it's understandable that someone may feel desperate enough to try and raise a storm on HN when there's literally no other avenue to getting somebody to look into the issue. Whether or not this should be happening on HN, I think its important to have SOME place where people can voice their issues so that these startups don't continue to think they can get away with selling incomplete products with little to no support when anything goes wrong.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930109
One major obvious benefit Go has over Clojure or Scala is simplicity.
Im on FF 24 and there seems to be no button to update it. I thought FF nowadays updates itself automatically?
There actually was a thread complaning about coinbase that got like 600+ votes and a huge discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705
I love jokes. My sense of humor is such, that it doesn't have to take shots at people for things they can do nothing about: the colour of their skin, their looks, their height, the name they're given, how they didn't choose the families they were born into.

Still, let's chill out. And process the half hearted apology of "sorry if anyone was offended, but not sorry I said it because I don't see the big deal".

I wasn't really that upset by you putting a reasonably accurate looking and long south indian name..

It did made me wonder if doing so was really that evolved from making up a willfully ignorant African or Asian inspired name 30-60 years ago. That, in turn, made me wonder if we're really progressing, and what made me write.

What's a joke to me, is how little empathy there is when someone is told to change their name to make it more acceptable and easier to pronounce because they're not worth knowing.

Maybe it'll start getting better when narrow minded thinking stops telling the world to be more open minded to tolerate their continued close-mindedness.
"So next time when you criticize macros"

I wasn't criticizing macros; I claimed that they don't give you much guidance to any particular convention because you can do anything.

A language without conventions is incomplete, so you need to do something active to bring the conventions about. In other words, the designers of lisp leave conventions as an exercise for the reader and really offer no guidance from the language itself.

Clojure and racket are trying to address that, which is good. I've played around with them a bit, generally found them pleasant, and I hope they succeed (though I did not find anything that would compel me to actually use them for the kinds of things I work on).

It's interesting that you bring up C++. I wonder what your feelings are about people who prefer C over C++?
The 1% win again: The system’s so fixed that a global class war is only a dream
> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives...

You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.
But Go does compete with C on performance for many tasks. If you're going to make a negative assertion, please back it up.
How old are you? Not bashing, really curious here!
I'm amazed at how prophetic that book [0] is. I wish it would be required reading for every Congresscritter, SCOTUS judge, every member of every federal agency, and all the other cogs in the executive branch ... but I fear they would simply see all the proven mistakes as a blueprint of what to do, only "smarter" this time.

----------------------------------------

[0] http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financia...
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
It basically takes centuries of data and shows how world leaders tend to make the same mistakes, causing crises, and then follow the wrong solutions to said crises.

More:
http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/
I have something similar as a shell script which can take a file as argument or paste its stdin, but it is for a personal pastebin (well it is public but I don't see the necessity of advertising it).

I found this one which does something quite similar: http://sprunge.us/
Using capacitance to cross the physical:digital divide
Wow. This is brilliant.
I know Facebook using the name without communicating first feels wrong, but this is just petty and won't succeed.
The video isn't online yet, but at FOSDEM this weekend there was a talk about "Firefox on Android". The guy said that it's actually adblock that's causing the long delays.
The city my sister used to live in had a free airport bus. Took you there for free. Might have been run by an airline. Saw many flight attendants utilizing it.
As we all learned with the Coinbase issues last year, yes this would have made a difference. It's better to link to a blog post and bring the thread here after.
The V2V proposal draws on existing car sensors
all that's needed is the addition of a small chip.

A smart response to a vehicle ahead suddenly braking requires both vehicles to know what road they're on, how many lanes that road has, and which lane they're in.

Maybe your car already has all that high-tech equipment, but my Honda CG125 sure doesn't!
>> But there must be a level of light where both cones and rods are within their dynamic range. What am I missing?

I am not sure if human vision is using one or the other. When both rods and cones are within the dynamic range, possibly response from both get utilized by the brain. I am not sure.
>When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.

I am inclined to agree. Already I can see the difference in the new interns and new hires at my job. Many of them are using chrome books at home so they tend to use chrome plugins to do everything at work.

Also professors and departments at universities are starting to use open source products in their curriculum as opposed to the traditional Microsoft suite. Even the school I graduated from uses google for email.
It was mentioned in yesterdays release notes (draft). The note seems to have been removed now. Anyway, it said something that the tool did not made it for this release.

Edit: As Jare mentioned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178225), the editor is disabled by default. Check Toolbox options.
Cancer = numerou8s diseases and I wish they never just lumped them all into one category.

SAD THING another knock against pediatric cancer. Pediatric cancer get's less then 4% of Federal Funding and American Cancer Society gives less then 1% toward it. Now these numbers will be used to funnel more money away from finding a cure for neglected research. Not one new chemotherapy drug for pediatric cancer in 24 years!!!!
Heck, posting on HN is the only way for most of us to get customer service from Google.
Also, the Haskell version parses the SQL, so no sqlite required.
>> Seriously, what problem does Facebook solve? Does it even do a very good job solving this problem? Does it have any redeeming quality whatsoever?

Seriously? Reconnecting with old friends (and it solved this problem so much better than anything else in history that it's laughable). Keeping in touch with family across the world. On a very simple level, it's basically replaced a folder on my computer for storing pictures, and now they are available to me no matter where I am.

If you want to talk about making money, it's made demographic targeting widely available to those who couldn't afford a television ad, or wanted actual metrics.

Slap bracelets came nowhere near the level of adoption Facebook hit. Calling it a fad is looking at the facts and willfully ignoring them.
Promises have always been debatable. The new Generators is probably what I am looking for.
He starts with his philosophy of what science is, which is apparently based on a TED talk by David Deutsch:

"...good explanations for why things are the way they are."

Oh no. Science, emphatically, does not answer why, or at least not the ultimate why. It answers how; it provides a set of models.

To quote Feynman, "While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that." from QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, p. 10.
Werewolf could be a lot of fun with Glass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
It does, but if you want to update immediately go to About, there's a button there to update.
This did not take place in the US.
And you're sure that the ODB2 port is powered while the ignition is off? I was under the impression that mine isn't.
GPM reaches V1
Oh.

See, yesterday I thought they were being quite civil and just getting some free publicity from the whole thing. But today...
So Express Scripts ($100B in annual sales) is going to get taken out by unit dose packaging? WalMart's pharmacy is also testing blister packs + multi-dose...I don't see how this displaces ESI...
The Banality of Video Streaming Services
A ssl version of the code should be provided. Many sites, such as the one we are on, only allow SSL connections and mixed-content is a poor security practice.
I'd be interested to see how FiftyThree proves damages in this case, and whether or not the judge will make a call for the punitive damages.

I definitely think that there's no doubt about it: the FiftyThree Paper sales will certainly take a hit, and the brand is diluted hugely, especially for those who haven't encountered it yet.

This was obviously a conversation that Facebook had, and chose to do it anyway - not sure exactly what the result of the conversation was internally, but it almost certainly had to have some phrase like "well, if they sue us, we can handle it."
You need mass that's at a lower temperature. Vacuum is an insulator.
"a way to get the message through to the investors so that the problem could be resolved without legal unpleasantness."

So, not looking for honest advice but using HN as a side channel.

UPDATE: I never said it wasn't well intended. I said it wasn't for honest advice, OP was using HN as a communication forum side channel.

UPDATE 2: If he wanted honest advice he'd have been wise to omit the start up name.

UPDATE 3: The primary purpose of OPs post was to use HN as a communication vehicle with the start up involved, not to seek advice.

UPDATE 4: If the OP was seeking honest advice then he wouldn't have posted the name of the start up. Posting the name of the start up which happens to be funded by the provider of the discussion medium you are using is going to result in BIASED advice.
Good luck, seriously. There's 0 reason for facebook to care.
How to reach the million people of this internet
9. Syngenta hired a communications consultancy, the White House Writers Group, which has represented more than sixty Fortune 500 companies. In a memo describing its strategy, it wrote that, "regarding science, it is important to keep in mind that the major players in Washington do not understand science."
> It should be noted that Medium article rarely make the front page nowadays due to penalties, so a personal blog post might work better.

Meta question....What are these penalties you are referring to?

My understanding was the only ban hacker news imposed on sites was a binary one. ie a domain was banned or treated as an equal to all other allowed domains.
I wrote Zephyros[1] for Mac OS X, which is scriptable in pretty much any language, and used that for a while.

Eventually my OCD kicked in about the performance of Zephyros's server/client architecture on my laptop, so I forked it as Phoenix[2], which is only scriptable via an embedded JavaScript VM. Now I use Phoenix exclusively.

Here's my current tiling config[3] for Phoenix.

But I'm currently trying to make the transition from Mac OS X to Windows 8. So I plan to port Phoenix to Windows, and I'm naming it ZephSharp[4] (I'm terrible at naming things). It's going to be written in C#, which fortunately has ClojureCLR, so Clojure will be its scripting language instead of JavaScript (hoorah!).

[1]: https://github.com/sdegutis/zephyros

[2]: https://github.com/sdegutis/phoenix

[3]: https://gist.github.com/sdegutis/7756583

[4]: https://github.com/sdegutis/zephsharp -- Nota bene, it's not even close to working, I've only spent a few hours prototyping some basic hard-coded stuff, so beware!
"People arguing that X "is too powerful""

Who is arguing that?
Have you sent him a copy of all of his data? That may go a long way toward reducing/eliminating the risk to his business whilst you reach out.

Your note here suggests you may not have spoken with him yet, and may not even have a confirmed time for a phone call.
I had never noticed that but you are right! I thought it was normal....
i think im missing something too...
there is a trello board for voting on which docs should be included:
https://trello.com/b/6BmTulfx/devdocs-documentation
Security in other countries is not nearly as painful as in America
Ruby 2013 in review Gemnasium
Microsoft uses Modernizr and Normalize.css for the CEO page
> They are built to seek profit. If they obey the law, it is only because obeying the law maximizes profit. If they are moral, it is only because morality maximizes profit. On the other hand, if breaking the law maximizes profit (e.g. because enforcement is lax or penalties are low) then that's what they'll do. Likewise, if immoral acts make the most money, that's what they'll do.

This has been demonstrated to not be true. Decision makers at corporations are not rational actors, they may choose to pursuit business plans and take courses of action that actually harm profit. We have seen in the banking and housing collapse that there are those that knowingly seek their own personal profit at the expense of others, including the very businesses they work for.

> What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans. Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one. Villainy falls out of the corporate structure and lots of employees just doing their jobs to keep bread on the table.

This is has also been demonstrated to be false. While certainly the very nature of corporations creates negative externalities, we have had plenty of examples of high level executives that pursue a course of profit that knowingly endangers and harms others and may ultimately even be ruinous to the business itself.
I don't think size matters so much as company priorities. Amazon has bent over backwards for me many times. Whether at scale or not, good support takes very specific focus.
The Signals that Make Tech Startups So Homogeneous
I concede this point. The article was written from the perspective of a user who's running a high volume app and wants maximum control over how they communicate with foreign services (i.e. my perspective).

I certainly don't want to dissuade companies from writing SDKs. They're great products and really help in getting people much needed traction as quickly as possible. For the GA of the new Heroku API we'll be shipping SDKs in as many languages as we can support!
> D-Wave answers "How Quantum is the D-Wave Machine?"

This is the first time I've heard "quantum" used as an adjective. But probably not the last.
and will drag society and social progress ...

If your "social progress" is accomplished at the end of a gun barrel, it should be rolled back to the Victorian age, or even the Stone age. What good is social progress without freedom? If we institutionalize the use of coercive force to accomplish social ends, then we're a fucked society anyway.
So long answer, short, you don't know.

I've not been watching them closely, but they are delivering, which seems an extremely strong indication they're not dysfunctional at all.

Every now and then I end up on a gov site they've redone and it's immediately obvious they've had at it because it's easy to use, responsive, etc.

You're sounding like one of those pointy haired bosses that don't understand that good developers play to succeed, and it doesn't always pay off. But if you stop them you end up with crap because the good people leave.
- and the titlebar font is wrong

- and the titlebar text doesn't fade correctly when in the background

- and a 100 other inconsistencies with the rest of my OS

please developers stop rolling your own windows for no reason
I love my RT-AC router and I do not use Ai Cloud and I have FTP turned off. I check all the time. People that buy $200+ routers should be the ones to turn things off.

My name wasn't on the list.
Who is John Thompson: Microsoft's new chairman?
Short answer: HN is not meant for ceaseless flame wars and drama (though it sometimes occurs).

That being said, I can feel the frustration of the original author, having been f*cked over before by a company I was a customer of. Seems like the problem is resolving itself, though. A rational corporate agent will try to repair this reputational blow in a swift manner.
The generator example has no error handling (at least not from what I can see).

Once the "callback hell" example was re-written with named functions, it is not much different than the generator example and depending on how you are testing, easier to test because it separates out IO from logic (Which you could still do in the generator example).

One thing callback style code has begun to make me think about is the nesting/IO complexity of the functions a I write. When you nest, the IO/event boundary is visible in the code (by the indentation). As you continue to nest, you can start to get a clear idea of the amount of IO being done and where a particular function may be doing too much. Anyhow, most of this is preference anyway :)
In theory - the poster below pointed out that they added a requirement later which eliminated support for any pre-2003 CPU. The demo I referred to happened about a year before Windows 8 RTMed.
Feeling Insecure? Blame Your Parent
Gloves, now coming to every cornershop in your shantytown. Free loaf of bread for the 1st happy customer.
Thanks for making this important point. Science explains, it doesn't justify or rationalize. And each of science's explanations is open to falsification by new evidence.
I understand there are weighting penalties, where points for certain domains only count as e.g. 40% of their real value.
>>do you think the union should then go to bat for that employee? I think the union should absolutely have the right to pick and choose which cases to defend, especially in cases of clear and blatant violation of established rules and protocols.

Supreme Court decided long ago that unions are legally obligated to defend all of their members regardless of what they do. It is commonly referred to as the "duty of fair representation." It originated in Steele v. Louisville and Nashville Railroad, but there has been more than sixty years of jurisprudence extending and clarifying that right since then. Essentially, what it comes down to is that if you are a member of a union, and you do something dumb, the union has to defend you.
It's effective this time.

It wouldn't be effective if it became a complaint board.

Very glad to see that the CEO cares enough to comment, though. Good faith there, even if the op was "against the rules".
Leaving aside the debate over trademarking common words, it's surprising FiftyThree hadn't already trademarked their product names. They charge a premium price for well-branded products - trademarking those names should have happened as a matter of course.
Well, a cooperative relationship of course would work best. Unfortunately the historical circumstances that gave rise to unions didn't include such a relationship. Unions became favorable because of abusive practices by organizations (employers) with an incredibly lopsided advantage in resources (financially and politically). That hasn't changed in the last 100 years.
What browser do you use now? I recommend Firefox's Extended Support Release, which receives only security updates for twelve months
Name.com has a version of MFA they rolled out about a year ago:

http://www.name.com/blog/general/security/2012/12/our-vp-of-...
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except I wanted to point out that I still greatly prefer native email clients (I'm 24, for what it's worth). Outlook is actually a very competent piece of software on OS X and I use it at work; it's easily on par with Mail.app for me. I prefer either of these to any web email interface I've used, as they are considerably more responsive (even Gmail seems laggy in comparison).
Still it can't deal with memory pressure, and will just eventually oom & crash.
Then Flash prompts for an update, then Acrobat Reader, then Java...
My impression is that this forum provides some extraordinary benefits to YC companies. It's only natural that it would introduce a few risks as well.

One would hope that moderation will be just enough to keep HN from becoming a catch-all support site, without stifling the conversation altogether.
"omg I'm so afraid of change!"
Thanks, I will experiment with disabling adblock and see if gets better.
It being pure distilled drama would be a reason for it to be #2 on front page. You didn't even reply with a different opinion about what reason it's high on the front page.

So he has an opinion that he's willing to write out and expose to critical evaluation. You don't. You're thinking & conversing wrong.
Until Github provides a more granular permission API, no one should be using this service. Doesn't matter what they promise. Mistakes happen.
In a social context, you make a very strong point.

Brace for business-based rationalizations as on why it's perfectly fine (HN is a YC marketing arm, he runs the website and can do whatever he wants, etc, etc).

If you're lucky, someone will start throwing around the word "entitled" to make you look like the bad guy just for expecting any standard of behavior from another that isn't exclusively profit focused.
I thought the DMCA was about copyrights, not trademarks.
I think some airlines let you pay for priority boarding.