skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do they need a mobile version, really? I wouldn't use it at work, and we all seem to get along with the native versions just fine. It's the corporate clientele that pays the big bucks for these products, and I'm not aware of them clamoring for a mobile version.

(PS, I've only actually worked at startups which have grown into larger companies. At no time did I or anyone else I was aware of feel the need for mobile Excel.)
Aren't GitHub involved with Gitter somehow? https://gitter.im/
One angle that I expected Microsoft to eventually leverage is playing to their traditional strengths -- diversity, openness, freedom (and what that meant for the platform. GPUs, storage, media -- Microsoft and the Windows platform made that evolution happen): The classic montage through the computer age sort of thing, culminating in the Microsoft platform of today. Instead they fell for the trap of cargo culting off of what Apple was doing, essentially becoming a desperate wannabe, the Microsoft store being the ultimate demonstration of how utterly self-defeating that can be.

Microsoft is still great -- even outside of raw financial might, they continue to make great software and tools (as one aside, it is quite remarkable how enormous of an impact Bill Gate's trustworthy computing manifesto had) -- but from an influence perspective they have had little for quite a few years.
Veterans gather for Colossus 70th anniversary
As long as businesses keep buying Office for desktop, does that matter? Is there a mobile platform that is displacing Office or Outlook/Exchange that they're failing to compete with? http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20...
I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with.

> The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

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.

The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so.

The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it).

Edit: Wanted to add "How Microsoft Lost the API war" which is another interesting take on the platform thing and how Microsoft lost it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
512 MiB rlimit and you usually have 10s of tabs open? I'm not surprised you're having problems; that's a pretty unusual and challenging configuration. Do other browsers behave any better?
Not sure why anybody would want to acquire Campfire? It's an utterly terrible product. If GitHub wanted to added chat collaboration features they'd write them from scratch based upon WebSockets / Socket.IO... not the legacy polling that Campfire does!
I have yet to encounter such a task, and "competing" is not the same thing as matching or beating.
So his "valid" (to you) options are

1) buy CD/DVDs (except the ones that are unavailable or hard to find) and rip them (assuming this is sufficiently legal) then throw away the useless pieces of plastic you just paid premium for (which in some regions equates your license), or

2) buy CD/DVDs (except the ones that are unavailable, etc) and put up with plastic crap that is bulky, unreliable and slow, or

3) not buy anything

It's ridiculous, this is the 21st century. They can fit a whole season of some serial onto a micro-SD card, but instead you want me to buy a "box set" of cardboard junk and plastic that is larger than the laptop I intend to watch it on? (which, incidentally, doesn't have a DVD drive for pretty much the same reason it doesn't play cassette tapes or vinyl records either)

Five years ago I had a fire, packed salvageable stuff with smoke damage in big cardboard storage boxes. Over the years I've unpacked and cleaned almost all of the items. The box with all my CDs? They are probably fine (I guess), but I never bothered, I just got them digitally and am happy about those things not taking up any shelf space.
Free Bootstrap Themes and Templates
All templates were created based on Bootstrap (HTML5 & CSS3 Framework).
With enough bandwidth everyone is vulnerable.
"As far as evil goes, to me, Google is much more scaring than MS."

You've said more about your knowledge of the history of computing than you have about Google or Microsoft.

Edit: I think it would be interesting and amusing to know the ages of people downvoting this. Microsoft has such an incredible history of anti-competitive behavior that I'm surprised anyone believes Google is even in the same league of evil as Microsoft.
>To put it in another way. Gaming (put together): not much of an industry, compared to IT/mobile sales.

Why are you comparing gaming to IT/mobile? It should be compared to other entertainment industries. It has already surpassed Hollywood in terms of revenue in the US ($17bil vs $9bil in 2011). Having a dominant product in the gaming industry begets a lot of influence.

Worldwide, The VG industry generates around $70 billion in revenue (excluding mobile gaming). In comparison the movie industry - (all countries combined, not just hollywood releases) generates around 120 billion.

>Every gamer could as well only use an Xbox, and it still wouldn't matter much for the kind of discussion we're having about Microsoft.

Please explain what you mean..
They exists for over 4-5 years now (I don't remember exactly the first time I discovered this service, but it was around that time).

I believe the are located in an area where legislations are less strict and they can do this without having any problems.
To work together or Not to work together
This is precisely what happened to me. I started off in Molecular and Cellular Bio, but recently switched to programming. Like you said, the field is simply brutal. Making it to the top of your career track is extremely difficult and demands a lot of time and effort for little pay. Not to mention that final step, becoming a professor, is out of your control as all you can do is wait for an existing one to retire or die.
Interesting. I always saw 37Signals as a good example of a diversified portfolio. I notice they're going to keep the side projects (books, job board) which probably have the highest margins and require very little ongoing investment of mental energy. I don't see where the growth in Basecamp is going to come from, but then I don't use the product (tried it once, too limited.)

Also, did Jason Fried step out of a time machine with his IBM Selectric typewriter to compose this? 37Signals have always been on the hipster end of things but the design of this letter is ridiculously so.
Wow, as one of the "pioneers" of the SaaS model, and a highly successful bootstrapped startup for 10+ years, I would have to say... yes, I would imagine you are one of very few people in this community who would have never heard of 37signals.
The Most Important Facebook Redesigns in Its 10-Year History
Ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab are the built-in ways to do that, if that's any help.
Regarding all the positive comments, I think the previous guy was so bad, and the new guy mostly nondescript, that people are projecting all their hopeful wishes onto the new guy.

Really, a lot like what seemed to happen with Bush and Obama.
We're using docker at ShareLaTeX to run the latex compilation. It lets us have lightweight isolated containers so that we can now let people do scary/cool things like run R code in a secure way.
Weird, so like they themselves have a chargeback policy? Ugh.
One major obvious benefit Clojure and Scala have over Go is having features developers need and want.
Favourite web-conferencing startups that are bringing sexy back
I thought they were done by two separate group. Would be great if Gitter was part of Github though.
Because two women can't be married? You're nitpicking.
Your video is awesome :) It warped my mind a little bit (in particular the "let's execute some program written next week" part--or did I imagine that), and also made me dig into Borges' works again ;)
I'm running Clozure CL on quadcore ARM-based computers at home. Nicely multithreaded. Works great.

Threads in ECL:

http://ecls.sourceforge.net/new-manual/ch27.html

Threads in Clozure CL:

http://ccl.clozure.com/manual/chapter7.html#Programming-with...

Threads in SBCL:

http://www.sbcl.org/manual/index.html#Threading

ABCL support threads.

Threads in CLISP:

http://www.clisp.org/impnotes/mt.html
I do fine on the street, but my Chinese isn't technical enough to work at work, I just don't have the vocabulary (thankfully, English is supposed to be our working language anyways).
What makes a good Let's Play?
maybe so, but did microsoft own indian, and us politics as much as microsoft?
I'm sorry but I just can't believe you're real. Red Hat has the most stable (measued in the years of support without the change in the underlying technologies) OS configurations of all commercial offerings.

What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.
Most of the attention Go has been getting so far has been due having the Google name associated with it. If it had been $RANDOM_LANGUAGE from Google that would also have receive a bit of attention.
Not suggesting Bing. I'm only suggesting "not Google".

Times change. Google's core business doesn't.
It's weird how open-source encourages using something without really understanding how it originated. I bet less than 10% of the people who use Rails realize it came from a company, let alone which one. (The same will probably become true of dotCloud with Docker soon enough.)
50 ways to promote your iPhone app
They mean any paper, including toilet paper. This warning is common in Russia, don't ask why.
I am using PSM quite frequently too. Thanks for the library.
That doesn't sound like a good habit to have in this industry, things change and software evolves. Android's first few versions sucked..a lot for instance. Heck, most the of the early versions of OSS suck. Are you saying there should be a constant rate of change? If you're a programmer, you should really try coding on Visual Studio 2012/.NET/F# and C#. It's a breeze. Very smooth compared to Eclipse.
These: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7012822
Oh, I didn't know that. Sorry!
Oh, you're going to enjoy this read. A story that happened just recently:

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LAPD-Los-Angeles-Pol...

LEOs and DAs have no problem paying for false testimony, whether it's to cover SOD or not. They can use taxpayer money and there's no real repercussions for getting caught.

Innocent people are routinely murdered by police in my area, with no justification or repercussion. The lucky ones who survive get million dollar settlements in taxpayer money. The cops never face serious punishment. We had a group of LEOs literally beat a defenseless man to death, captured in full audio and video, and they got off scot free. Look up Kelly Thomas.
There was something like this on Norwegian TV, a live broadcast documentary lasting 134 hours:

http://www.hurtigruten.us/repository/MARKET-SPECIFIC-PRODUCT...
Microsoft can can do in the enterprise, they are entrenched pretty deep!
Life is a game, this is your strategy guide
I know next to nothing about you, but you are probably an ignorant gossipmonger.
"Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world"

There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?

This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.
Speculation: Azure will get a decent priority now that Nadedlla is CEO. Azure has been playing catcup with aws for quite some time now.
And, what do you imagine will solve the problem of entrenched bureaucracy? Given that bureaucracy tends to expand itself as a primary feature...saying a company is "just plagued" with it, is a pretty damning statement.
Actually no. We get 13-14 years out of Microsoft offerings which is enough lead time for test, provisioning and an 8-10 year lifecycle. Plus due to overlap we have enough time to test v.next.

With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to C++/JDK versions that are ancient etc. Also no MSDN, no partner support (which is pretty awesome). My few dealings with RedHat support have left us without a solution.

For ref - platforms: Exchange, Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server (the latter I've got an installation that has been cleanly upgraded since 1996 though TWO versions)
Since when was tagging on stock hardware was introduced by Common Lisp?

Don't tell me other Lisp implementations were faster than CL, because of not using tagging.

Today LispWorks, Clozure CL, SBCL, ... on my laptop run a thousand times faster than any other Lisp implementation ever did on a physical Lisp Machine. Actually they also run code much faster than Python, Ruby and most other popular scripting languages - often by a wide marging.

I think you repeat myths from 1984 where some implementors were claiming problems on small 1984 CPUs. They detected early that there were no problems compared to the Lisp Machine. You know one of the reasons the Lisp Machine was no longer popular for Lisp users from 1988 onwards? Stock hardware was a fast for many cases and much cheaper. Implementations like Lucid CL, Allegro CL and LispWorks were on workstations very competitive.

In reality, today on 64bit Intel chips, it runs just great. Even on something like an 32bit ARM, Clozure CL runs fine.

For many cases, good native Common Lisp implementations will run faster than Clojure.
The Speech Synthesis API: an introduction
If you’re running an online business in India, this could happen to you.
Optical data storage has virtually unlimited lifetime
What about the easiest way?

1. Add a low price for the first days, ie: 0,99.

2. Then tell a bunch of your backers that you want to give them 1$ via paypal or similar.

3. As you get responses and the application has been bought jump to the next bunch of packers.

4. Repeat.

5. When finish, raise the price you consider fair.

It will cost you around 30 cents * N. of backers and you will get a bit of traction from some early users thanks to the low price.
Two thoughts on this:

1) Strategy is primarily about saying "No" to activities that are not aligned with your goals and values. Here is a great example for saying no in a pretty gutsy way.
2) I have used Basecamp since its launch for my client work and like it quite a bit. However, lately I have preferred to work with Trello. I'm curious to see how Basecamp will change in the near future. Maybe I'm not their target customer any more...
RDP via SSH
I think they meant non-physical Bitcoin related items, i.e. Bitcoins.
maby try firegestures? allow you to map tab to mouse button
I really like 37signals, for Ruby, Rails or basically their taste for tech and their startup culture / their books. But none of their product really catches me. They are from ok to very good. But not great. Actually Basecamp was the only very good one.

Preferring Trello or Pivotal Tracker.
Black-box vs White-box Testing
> the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack

I remember when this idea was still pretty much seen as a "conspiracy theory" around the time when Wikileaks was getting DDOS'ed.
Christian men too. Call the small-sample police!
Autonomy made 80% less UK profit than stated, Hewlett-Packard finds
Do you enjoy your life-style of reading news delayed by 7 years?
Funny how the links to the footnotes in the article are intercepted by the numbered list near the bottom. You'd think somebody would have caught that bug by now.

The first time through, I thought they were the footnotes, and, oddly enough, they sort-of made sense. Especially the 2nd one, which came off as a strange joke (as in "We better make sure Microsoft doesn't catch the Apple bug").
The Singularity Is Far
Sony in talks to sell loss-making Vaio PC business
Fingersoft Finds Simple Is Profitable
Though I share your sentiments about losing the 37Signals name, their philsophy remains the same and I have high hopes that this change will result in an even better Basecamp!
On HN? Yes. Definitely in a small minority. In the world, no, probably 99.9 majority
"(I'm working on a simulation engine for this kind of stuff.)"

How do you calibrate it for a specific market?
I just hold the phone a little higher up in my hand and I don't seem to run into this issue. meh..

That said, I prefer having an option of manually refreshing the UI. When I'm connected to a spotty 3G tower - I don't get any indication if its fetching data or not. I suppose I can drag down the main UI and expose the iOS status bar and see the little circular progress bar, but not an ideal situation.
That's because you're making the mistake of believing them that what they're doing is monitoring or attacking terrorists most of the time. But it's not. Most of the time, their spying capabilities are used against stuff like this or against innocent people, who the government doesn't like.

That's really why they want to keep this power, and they don't have a good reason for keeping it, or at least not one they can say in public. That's why Clapper keeps saying "ok, we haven't foiled any terrorist attack - but trust us it's really important to keep it!". They know they can't just come out and say "hey, we need this to spy on allied politicians, judges, corporations, and other people you might think are innocent, but are really pissing us off, like many of the activists do".
> I also believe that exec() is not dangerous if you use it right

Just about anything can be "safe" if "used right" - that's a caveat big enough to land a 747 in, one only need define all unsafe uses as incorrect for it to become a truism that tells us nothing. And that's a pretty defensible definition for anything web facing!

Statistics will eventually catch up to us, and we will eventually find new and novel ways to use things wrong despite all attempts not to. Ergo: exec is dangerous. With care, you may safely navigate the danger.

For my own curiosity, I looked at some of the source. I'd fear parsing all those $ and {}s in strings to verify they're all awk variables and not PHP variables would quickly desensitize me to actual errors when reviewing or auditing such code. I'm not a PHP dev: Hopefully you have lint tools or somesuch less ignorable than syntax highlighting to catch the stray typo which eludes human review? As others have mentioned, lack of sudo is far from sufficient protection.
> freebies backed by big pockets

That also describes Bing.

> The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want.

How exactly is Dart dangerous? It's open source, unlike C#.
GitHub are known to have invested a lot in using Campfire, for example their bot Hubot integrates really well and they use it to manage the majority of their infrastructure.
People use Google-search because it's the default in all browsers.

That's why Google is still paying Mozilla money to make it the default in Firefox and it's why Google made Android and Chrome to be able to control what web-services people use by default, also on their mobile devices.

If the defaults switch from Google, most people wont notice. If you have any doubts about that, observe all people which has their search hijacked by malware.

Their search page has been diverted to a scummy non-Google page and nobody notices that anything is wrong.

Google definitely has a strong hold on the web, but they're a lot more fragile than you think.
Agree with that, I didn't really know what it was before this article, just looked at the website and can't imagine companies being attracted by it.
Everyone on HN used multiple languages and technologies. Have you used VS with ReSharper?
USA is worst than taliban....
Ingestible camera wins US approval
Depends on what you mean by data.

Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages.

Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.
Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
I can never find the programs one. I swear every time I open it Windows checks a rnd to see if it should be called All Programs or Programs & Features.
I have heard about them. There is that guy there who invented RoR apparently, and likes to posts articles explaining how cool he is etc.
What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape?

Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.

Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.

Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.
Getting to the 'Ph.D' as opposed to just 'post doc' is exactly the struggle I described. You have to make it through that whole cluster f'ck and get enough (good) publications for your Ph.D to mean a damn thing.

If it doesn't... Congrats 'Doctor' you make 50k a year after working in the field for 10 years (plus all the schooling you had to pay for)!
A quick tour of relational database access with Scala
Pioneer? web-mail is nothing else but SaaS in the end and it exists way longer than 37Signals...
Sony said to be in talks to sell PC business to Japan fund