skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basic Testing Setup With RSpec and FactoryGirl
A few more off the top of my head: Deis, Strider, Runnable, baremetal.io, stackmachine, dockify.
it was a reply to somebody kindly asking an explanation using linear algebra concepts.
I like Clayton Christensen's formulation:

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3225-what-are-questions
The heavy elements (carbon, oxygen, iron, etc) we and our planet are made of were manufactured through fusion in the heart of stars. As as far as I understand it, even 15 million years after the big bang the universe was almost entirely made of hydrogen and traces of helium. Any heavier elements that did exist would still be locked up inside the first generation of stars that were making them. Perhaps the paper mentioned addressed that?

Still, it's an interesting notion. At some point there may have been a sweet spot between the background temperature and the availability of materials, and that point may have been billions of years in the past.
Check out the Docker blog, there are tons of examples of companies using it for themselves. https://blog.docker.io

From memory there are presentations or blog posts by engineers at Ebay, Mailgun, Cloudflare, Spotify, RelateIQ, Atlassian, Baidu, Yandex, etc.
Fast forward seven years, and some of the biggest names in software (Instagram, Lyft) have completely abandoned the web for "desktop" (really, native) software.

But don't those software only work by connecting to their cloud servers? Could you use Instagram if Instagram Ltd turned off their servers? That means it's inherently web software.
I was only thinking this yesterday. It is very very true. All of it is client-server, just with different transport protocols. In the end, it is just interfaces to databases basically!
The sun was not enough, North Korea rips off OS X with Red Star Linux
why every time something new good happens some old sh8 must pop-up?
How can you be a "startup" for 10 years? Will they ever stop being a "startup"?
Hacktivists dish out DNS hijack to PayPal, eBay
Problem is, even if we stop fishing and decide to not touch a single fish in an ocean, our pollution and the global warming, will turn oceans into an acidic (as in as acidic as regular rain gets) cesspit of jellies.

I don't mean - go on and farm every last one of them, just that it will soon become an extinct creature, simply because we fucked up its environment beyond repair already.
Well, what would you have them do? Would it really be better for them to keep spreading themselves thin supporting too many products?

On the contrary, I think them refocusing on Basecamp should give you more trust that they won't pull a Google and pull the plug on it.
They made basecamp, and write articles about how awesome they are.
The common knowledge (although I don't know the exact reason and technical details yet - cryptocoins are amazing, they have lots of quirks to learn) is that a pool getting more than 50% of the network hashrate at any given moment is a Very Bad Thing. If that happens they can manipulate the network somehow. I hope someone can explain it better.

At some points last week, dogehouse was bordering 50% so there were warnings in the community to switch to other pools. Not that dogehouse has any problem, it works fine.
I urge everyone here to read this article about Congressman Pike's fight against the NSA:

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-...

This part especially stuck out to me:

> Pike was less interested in sensational scandals like Church’s poison darts and foreign assassination plots than he was in getting to the guts of the intelligence apparatus, its power, its funding, its purpose. He asked questions never asked or answered since the start of the Cold War: What was America’s intelligence budget? What was the purpose of the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies and programs? Were they succeeding by their own standards? Were taxpayers getting their money’s worth? Were they making America safer?

> Those were exactly the questions that the intel apparatus did not want asked. The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned.

From what I've noticed, nobody is asking these questions today, and yet NSA and CIA keep getting bigger and bigger funding, with NSA having nothing to show for it and yet with expanding capabilites, and CIA wanting more funds mainly to operate more drone strikes in secret (i.e. covert wars). This is a path that's actually dangerous for national security, either because they are collecting data on people that can later be hacked and gotten by rival nations, or because they're starting wars with other nations who knows for what selfish reasons, without the people knowing anything about it. We should have a big debate about it, yet no one seems to be starting it.
Sometimes, right before I submit a comment I'd ask myself, "What do I hope to achieve by writing this comment? Will people be entertained by this comment? Will the audience find their worldview challenged? Would the world be better off with the comment I'm about to make, or am I just wasting everyone's time?"

I'd suggest you do the same.
> I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.

How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever?

Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.
> You'll spend much more time just trying to figure out how to convert floating point values to strings.

I should hope not, since the source code to printf() should have pretty much the complete answer to that!
Some of the currently illegal substances are not physiologically addictive and are minimally harmful (if at all). There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers that show this. Researchers have also documented some beneficial outcomes through use as therapeutic tools . There is no sensible reason for these substances to be schedule I. Marijuana, LSD, and psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") are three of the more well known examples of this.

Additionally, your depiction of the societal effects of drugs is pretty ridiculous ("if drugs are legalized does everyone that avoids addiction need to move to a gated community for safety?"). Upon legaliztion, those who suffer from addiction could receve proper help much more easily, and long term outcome studies could be conducted far more effectively. This, coupled with regulation (which would foster safety standards and quality control), would result in greatly reduced negative societal impacts. Also, drugs which have been proven to have very little benefit and great potential for harm (meth, heroin, pcp, crack, etc) could remain illegal..
It was also a pretty dick move when they complained after someone (from Google?) reimplemented campfire in a day, and made them take it down.

If your entire product can be copied in a day, it's probably not that great.
That's true. Although the parent is right that everyone hates Windows 8+ and nobody cares about Metro apps in truth, the big money is made in the enterprise space. Windows Server, SQL Server and Exchange are huge. People think that everyone could install a Linux box and migrate but it isn't that easy. Give a Windows admin a Linux box and see how dumbfounded he will be.

The iPad made a splash in the consumer world and perhaps in the BYOD world a bit but you don't really see people doing real work on them or ditching their desktops to use them. Great for consuming, not for creating (unless you enjoy struggling). I think as long as Microsoft caters to the enterprise market and move away from attempting to force a mobile UI on a desktop, things will go swimmingly for them.

Having said that, Windows 8 on a Surface is a joy to use! Just not on a desktop without having to fling your mouse all over the place to get things to appear.
Let's try another example: do you use foursquare and if so how do you feel about its maps?

I think its a good example of data > render, with ux in the front of mind. Unfortunately we are good at the read case, not as good at the contribute case.
A million times this. We had a small division of our company using Basecamp for a bit but it got canned after some changes and they went crawling back to Salesforce.

It stinks but it stinks consistently!
It's very difficult to change fundamental things in your well-established, popular OS. See Windows x86/x64, see the difficulties of redesigning iOS in version 7, see the disappointed people who buy an Android hybrid and try to use it as a laptop replacement.
For some reason, I have all kinds of tablets at home -- iPad Air, Surface 2 (with RT), Sony Xperia Z, ... Currently I feel that it'd be a shame if the Surface didn't become more popular, even the RT version is so much more that the other two platforms. I am not speaking about Metro, you can love it or hate it -- but the fact that it has proper support for keyboards (with shortcuts and everything) and also it's much more gesture-driven than the other two platforms. Obviously it's severely lacking apps compared to the other platforms, but the fundamentals are simply great and I'd be sad to see this platform disappearing. As I said, it's features will not be easily and quickly integrated into Android or iOS, as 'responding effectively' is not as simple as it might seem.
So which drawer is the Ultima Weapon in?
Gamers are fickle. Enterprise not so much.

Pulling out all of your infrastructure and software systems and logical processes and replacing it is hard. Swapping your console and signing up to another service is not.

Just an observation.
Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of Delphi moved to MS in 1996 and became lead architect of C# in 2000. Which kind of explains why C# has many of Delphi's nicer features.
Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere.

They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?
Why couldn't they offer BTC as a funding method alongside whatever they currently have? It doesn't have to be exclusive.
Long-Time Google Ads Exec Susan Wojcicki is YouTube’s New Boss
Which problems do Surface tablets solve?

For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.

I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?
The strange thing is that with Windows XP, you could go online and search for software from within it. You could "get software" from within XP (somewhere in the Control Panel I think?)

Perhaps it didn't take off due to the lack of wide-ranging Internet connectivity at the time. But they did at least attempt an online shop/store at the time. But everyone forgets this.
>But, still, the US seems to be quite effective in producing new technological things, and maybe that's partly the entrepreneurial mercenary culture as well as the mere fact of being a rich country.

Speaking as a born USAian, I honestly believe it's more that the USA can and does brain-drain the entire rest of the world. When you actually raise people in an environment of mercenary capitalism, what you mostly get is poor people. When you let social-democratic states across the world raise and educate people, let them fund their research or their early attempts at businesses, and then steal those people when they get successful enough to be an easy bet and put them in a ruthless entrepreneurial environment, then you get a seemingly high concentration of high-talent, high-productivity businesses.

It's kind of like how people outside Israel say we've become a high-tech powerhouse through the discipline of our military training, but actually the Israeli army is one of the world's worst bloated, effort-wasting bureaucracies for every soldier outside a tiny elite.
Yep, there are "forms" (interfaces for entering data) and "reports" (interfaces for extracting data) and that's really it as far as 99% of apps go. Even massively complicated things like Amazon are really just a form for you to say what you want, and a report they run in the warehouse to tell them what to pack. There's nothing to it that would be unfamiliar to a programmer from the '70s.
Could anyone familiar with the project reveal what kind of volumes are we talking about? E.g. nvidia's web page says that the minimum is 100,000 units.

It kinda makes sense not to sell these in small quantities because the SoC manufacturer would either end up getting lots of support requests or they would get a bad reputation for ignoring support. The reason is that unlike in the x86 world where there's some kind of a "standard" (derived from the IBM PC), ARM SoCs don't have any kind of consistent ecosystem where the motherboard components, firmware, etc would be specified. Every ARM SoC boots in a different manner, they might have separate bootloaders and there's a whole lot of SoC specific code in the Linux kernel.

Of course, the SoC manufacturer might be able to release documentation about the chip, but that kind of documentation might not exist (in a neat package that can actually be released and not e.g. an intranet wiki), it might contain sensitive IP (lawyers would have to get involved) or it might be written in a foreign language (and translating technical documentation from Chinese or Korean is not cheap either).

For the industry to mature and move forward, a common standard for SoCs would be a very welcome development.

Disclosure: I work as a SW engineer in a SoC company but I have no connection to the sales department and don't really know how this works in practice.
If we are worried about "Losing the moral high ground" then we've got a lot more to be worried about than a few civil servants acting as script kiddies.
Is there logic behind France’s rumored €1 Billion Google Tax?
Apple won by not fighting the last war. If Microsoft wants to stay relevant, they need to do the same. What's next? The smartphone, tablet, and cloud services ships have left port and are pretty far out on the horizon. Can Microsoft see what is around the corner the other guys cannot? They are, for the first time since they were founded, the underdog. They have a stellar research group whose output they seem to rarely take advantage of. It's time to get some stuff out of the lab and take some risks. The Kinect shows me the mojo is there -- and it was almost certainly Ballmer's narrow-mindedness that has prevented Microsoft from taking enough risks. I hope now that they have a technical visionary at the helm we'll really see them shake things up, and this is coming from someone who has loathed Microsoft products for quite some time now.
Steve Jobs wanted Sony VAIOs to run OS X
I'm perhaps not a reliable source, but I will say Yes.

Or perhaps No?

There's a lot of plastic on a Mac. Look at the G3 desktop.
Do you think it could be fake - i.e. a bunch of bots trading back and forth to generate interest? If so, that's a very clever way of bootstrapping to critical-mass popularity. That reminds me of a story of a new york nightclub that pretended to be jam packed the first few nights with a bouncer outside telling everyone: "sorry, the place is full", when in fact, the place was empty. Needless to say, the first night it was actually open, hundreds were standing in line.
And most people used Windows in the late 90s/early 2000s because Microsoft effectively paid every single OEM to do so and locked them in to restrictive covenants against shipping anything else. For the purposes of comparison it doesn't really matter why everyone uses their products, all that matters is that they do.

I'm not really sure on what you're judging my thoughts on their fragility. I made a pretty simple claim, that the vast majority of people use something Google made regardless of who made their OS. Could someone topple them out of that? Of course. Just like someone toppled Microsoft and IBM before them. It will cost a boatload of money, but someone will eventually do it.

I just don't see how an arbitrary exclusion refutes the claim, or what relevance it has to the price of rice in china. It'd be like saying "Not everyone uses a Microsoft product every day because Windows doesn't count" in 1999. Well... ok then.
Upvoted for the Tom waits reference.
My hunch - as I was reading - was that the second announcement would be that they'd open-source the other products.. I was wrong.
I quite like this idea. A lot of toolkits already allow a widget to specify a "preferred size." I wonder if a simpler approach to your idea would be similar to e.g. the Accept-Content-Type HTTP header; a widget lists a series of preferred widths (or width ranges) with weights.

preferred-width: 300px, 1.0; 200px..299px, 0.7; 100px..199px, 0.5;

That's slightly less flexible than a utility curve function, but (especially if ordered) is far easier to optimize for, as choices are ordered and restricted.
Just sell the damn Hats instead!
Fifty-Five Bodies, and Zero Trials, at the Florida School for Boys
Sexy Girls
Sexy Girls
Work your whole body at home using body weight and household items in this high intensity workout. Get yourself the sexy body you only dreamed of.
Sexy Females Fitness Models doing home workout to workout their sexy body. Butt, legs, arms, abs.
Dance is a form of performance art, traditionally associated with strip clubs, which combines dance and acrobatics. This art form has recently gained popularity as a form of fitness and mainstream entertainment, practised by many enthusiasts in gyms and in dedicated dance studios.
Wait a minute. Intelligence agencies _are not_ law enforcement. This is a common misconception. Intelligence agencies do not engage in law enforcement, even though in some nation-states police have access to some intelligence agency information.

My bet is they didn't really consider Anonymous a threat, but just experimented to see how much effort it is to clobber them if need should arise at some point in the future.
> Still it is excessively difficult to find a job without moving abroad: [...]

Then move abroad! Don't stay in Europe, where salaries are low and taxes are high. I just moved to Asia a year ago, and only regret not having gotten out earlier.
Or their move is because of Trello.
Nobody had ever connected the dots?

That's nonsense. I studied Physics in the early 90s and the various possibilities for early habitability used to crop up in conversation - in the common room if nothing else.
The problem is spreading yourself too thin in the first place, getting people to rely on your products, and then pulling them. I think it's much more acceptable for a small business like 37Signals to do this than a large one like Google. Google has the resources to keep products around, 37Signals doesn't.
Why this is even a matter of discussion is beyond me!
Shiva Keshavan, Indian luger, also received a majority of his donations in dogecoin!

http://www.ibtimes.com/dogecoin-raises-7000-send-indian-luge...
Torus-Earth
Foursquare has one major new partner – Microsoft
This is a fantastic article - I wish I had known this guide when I was young. I liked it so much, I sent a link to my teenage son. However, if you would not mind, could this be edited so my teeanage daughter would also enjoy it? Unless, of course, she wants to be a "ladies magnet" - I support her life choices. But if we want more women entrepreneurs, we should encourage them to follow a path like this without the possible sexism.
Even better, Amazon don't need to get a physical report but use hand-held devices.

So, clearly the plan is:
1. Write a good database (as Oracle say "the database is the application")
2. Put a dummy interface on it (RESTful HTTP anyone?)
3. Write a native client for each platform (or maybe a web based one if you want endless testing and pain)
4. Profit? (Or perhaps running costs... and no profit)

Weirdly, they recycle this concept again and again as something ground-breaking and wonderfully new but this is 99% of apps, as you say.
The XBOX also cannibalized PC sales. Pre-XBox you bought a PC to play the latest games every 2 years. Now you buy an Xbox.
GCHQ has a bunch of people. Some of these are experienced staff. Some of them are new to the post. It's possible that some things like targeting anonymous are used as training exercises.

I'd hope the training was more subtle than DDOS that group.

Don't forget that this is an event that became public and that we don't know what work GCHQ were doing behi d the scenes. The IRA and STEAKKNIFE operations show that British Intelligence isn't as hopeless as a lot of current stories make them seem.
All sorts of parts can be surprisingly hard to find. I've been working on a radio product where the 16-way channel selector switch had to be specially ordered from China, while everything else came from Digikey.
It's different. On Windows, it has brilliant debugging capabilities. IntelliJ is maybe the best general-purpose IDE out there, so even being comparable to IntelliJ is a big feat.
Photic sneeze reflex
I know he's not talking about web apps. But how is Microsoft going to be a dominant player providing services to apps running on platforms that are controlled by others?

Both Apple and Google want to control their own cloud platform, and they can make sure that their cloud solution is better integrated than Microsofts offerings on their own platforms. And at least Google knows how to do this kind of thing really, really well.

So my point is, unless one expects platforms / operating systems to overall become irrelevant (which some web proponents believe), I can't see how he can draw this conclusion in earnest. It's exactly the same argument he's criticized others for making time and time again with Apple, the only difference being that "Apple should give up their operating system, bundle Windows and only focus on hardware". Of course it's obvious today why that would have been a terrible idea.
For level2 you could also implement load balancing pretty easily. See my write-up: https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups/tree/master/stripe-ctf3/le...

Would you mind sharing the code to your solutions as gists so we can link to them from the write-ups repository? You got some very nice scores.