skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the best written, best argued, and most relevant of the Nadella "advice" articles. Not the ones in the major tech news, from the big commentator names, this.

The problems the post outlines are the ones behind the decline in Microsoft's desktop business and increasing irrelevance. And they are correctable. Two examples:

* Sticking the word “Windows” at the end of things that weren’t Windows wasn’t a good idea.

* Sticking the word “Live” to things that are poor online services, or that are so-so desktop programs that you choose not to ship with Windows and that you end up cancelling wasn’t a good idea.
I would bet money that this is a stunt for the Comedy Central show "Nathan For You", which is coming back for a second season soon and does all kinds of weird business-y stunts like this.

In the first season he got a gas station to offer gas at a steep discount, but only after rebate- but you had to drop the form off in person at the top of a mountain:

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/zhbu8g/nathan-for-y...

It increased business because people came for the low price, but only a handful of people actually decided to try to redeem the rebate. Those that did try to redeem it had to camp out overnight and solve riddles:

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/q9ibj6/nathan-for-y...

On another episode Nathan tried to help a Haunted House to create buzz by getting someone to sue them for being too scary:

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/nf0ws2/nathan-for-y...

He did this by making a couple think they'd contracted a disease and were being rushed to the hospital:

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/wvuntb/nathan-for-y...
Why don't the anti-systemd folks publish some actual attacks against that big ol' attack surface?

I've been using it for maybe 18 months, it was different and different is some times scary but I have had no problems at all. Migrated some legacy init scripts and it's a piece of cake. It's fast, it works, it does what it claims to do. I've been shipping unix software mostly on linux for 15 years and there are very real reasons systemd, launchd, smf, upstart and other "do more than nothing" init systems exist and companies making money selling them write them. All of them are much much more simple for the administrator to use too...
Dell isn't winning much on this. The service calls and now the reputation hit cost them more than they could make repairing laptops.
I think that most people able to deal with AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean will also be able to deal with monads. The jump in abstraction level doesn't seem that high but the complexity seems much lower and code reuse is actually possible, so it would be worth it too. Maybe even for those programmers that never embraced those abstract factories because they simply didn't feel like they'd get enough benefit.

There is just not enough (approachable) material on the subject right now but the amount seems to be growing every day. The percieved "coolness" factor is also rising, and even though in principle we should choose only based on technical merits, us programmers will definitely go through many more obstacles for something that is perceived as cool / fashionable / in demand.

My guess is that most programmers are simply put off by the completely alien terminology rather than the complexity or abstraction level. But this terminology wont remain alien forever - its already entering into more widespread use.

I yearn for a reasonably "right way" to develop software - for a set of solid patterns with truly good characteristics. Not a silver bullet, but at least a set of universal principles that apply to any high quality bullet. The acceleration of the current chaos only reinforces this yearning. There is just too much magic, too many approaches, too many opinions, too much rehashing of the same-old, too much cargo-culting, but not enough facts. I have a hunch that the functional languages of today may be on the verge of being able to offer that "right way". I guess I'll find out soon...
> hackerlunch is only available in San Francisco

Might have been a good idea to make that clear beforehand?
well, this strategy was all laid out by the designer of the american constitution over 200 years ago in the federalist papers (the ones written by madison) and his notes on the constitutional convention. Madison wrote that the primary purpose of the structure of the american govt under his constitution was to preserve wealth inequality. Madison wrote that the way to do this was to prevent the majority from uniting and discovering their common interest. The way he proposed to keep the majority from uniting was to create factions in voting districts by creating enlarged voting district (federal districts). Thus enlarged, the districts would have more factions and that would "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" (to quote madison).

Also useful in preventing the majority from using the government against the minority of the opulent was the pseudo-democratic structure of the federal govt (strong checks and balances and separation of powers). This would hinder the ability of the majority to control the government. That would keep the wealth of madsison, jefferson, washington, morris et al., safe from that dirty, brutish mob (i.e., you and me).

The benefit to the elite of factions created by nation enlargement? The elite get to keep more of their wealth.

As the USA grows larger and more heterogeneous with mass immigration, we are less and less in control of our own govt.

Our cultural cousins in the rest of the western nations (canada, australia, UK, scandanavia, france, austria, germany etc) are all smaller and more homogeneous, and so the majority there therefore have more control of their own nations. However, as they elite cram more immigrants into those nations, factions grow and there is less majority control. And of course the elite created the EU along the lines of the USA so as to remove as much power as possible from the majority in those member nations.
Twit links should open a new window. It's cool, I spent a couple of minutes looking at the stream.
Except that record companies were never created for anyone's benefit except their own.

But also this article was written in 2006. It is now 2014, and hiphop has not been killed. In fact, this particular issue became a big nothing.

Record company's are really just banks now. They finance the artists, and perform marketing. And once the music is for sale, they take a portion of the profits. And to do so, they have some rights over the work, just like a bank has over a property under a mortgage.

Ideally, you wouldn't need outside financing to take your music to market. But if you do, you need to get the best deal. And if you are a nobody, that deal isn't going to include much for you. So bootstrap with small investors first and short term deals.

Banks, errr... record company's need a big portion of the profits, because half of their investments will fail. Well, half is probably generous. But if the rate of return for being a record company was so great, there would be more people doing it. Actually that happened, and there are lots more record company's now than ever, because you no longer need to be big to fight for shelf space in HMV, as HMV is almost bankrupt.
I think this is the first and last time that i will read the name Pewdiepie as HN comment :9.
Is it any different if you are doing this in bad faith? The picture posted mentions "Is this a real business? Yes it is. But for legal reasons, Dumb Starbucks needs to be categorised as a parody artwork". So they are clearly aware they are trying to get around copyright and this is probably pretty good evidence that they themselves don't really consider it as a parody artwork.

But would that actually make a difference if/when this goes to court?
They didn't bother to put $0.001 DC blocking capacitors on the DAC outputs? This isn't a "bug in the kernel" or any software, it's a clear hardware flaw.
Jeez, start VLC with an alias if it bothers you that much.
You should add the simpler, deeper issue of upvoting mechanically filtering out good long form content.

Say I found a link here and it's a really good long form story, I really got into it, even had a coffee break while reading it. Then I want to vote for it, but the link has fallen down and is hard to find back.

It is even worse on Google, Facebook or Twitter, because of the infinite scrolling. I always open seemingly interesting links in the background and continue scrolling, but then hardly ever even try to like, plus one or favorite good content.

It's like a perverse filter, selecting cat pics and crash gifs over really nice content that require more than a few seconds to digest.

The one who will fix this will actually revolutionize content selection and probably kill curation.
Bill Keller, Former Editor of The Times, Is Leaving for News Nonprofit
It really depends onto what one has been doing these 22 years ;) There's an effect of transfer learning. And I was not talking about the very top. You are right, getting to the very top, like Woz or Carmack probably requires that early start.
But how many try will it take to get pass 9998 and 9997? The precision there. I am sure someone may have that skill to do it, but it's really questionable whether all of them are legitimate or not. And in fact, are they all legitimate... the highest in real life I know is 200.
The problem here appears when you want to teach #1. You shouldn't do it without also teaching #2 and #3 (isn't that obvious enough?), but #3 is often out, and it seems that there are some people trying to not "lose time" with #2 either.
We could have literally had 3 new Hubble's in orbit for less than the cost of all those repair missions. Repairing a space station is useful because unlike the Hubble it takes more than one launch to get it into orbit, but repairing a satellite is pointless.
I'm not sure why, but this comment stuck with me and I kept thinking about it.

Here's an example of where I think learning CS, then programming, helped.

I had written my own JavaScript application framework, called Blossom[0], and I wanted "real physics". I took a look at the various 2D physics ports that had been made to JavaScript, and they all had pretty bad performance. Also, I knew from my work as a filmmaker that "real physics" is actually a pain in the ass, because what you actually want is directable physics that feel real. (Stick with me, I'm getting there...)

So, I took a step back and determined that what I wanted was to be able to use tween curves like normal, but have the actual path that was taken depend on the velocity and/or acceleration of the movement when the user released their finger, yet be "directed" according to the tween curve.

That required doing math, specifically, getting first and second derivatives from your tween curves. Yuck. Except, CS to the rescue, there are these things called Dual numbers[1], and when you use them, you get automatic differentiation[2] for free, without having to rewrite your code.

So I wrote a Dual number implementation for JavaScript, grabbed a JS parser and rewrote the tween functions at load time (i.e. with code, automatically) to use the Dual numbers so that I could extract the velocity and acceleration. I then took the original curve based on the user's movement, blended it with the tween derivatives, and the resulting animations were actually really great. The whole thing was efficient enough to get real time performance on an iPad 3 in mobile Safari, entirely in JavaScript.

And the total time from start of work to the physics-based Dual-number tween animations in Blossom? Two days, and about 2K LOC.

If I hadn't know about Dual numbers, there's no way I'd have gotten there just by sitting down and programming, and who knows how long it took the FB team to do the dynamics for FB Home, or the Apple team to add UI Dynamics to iOS 7. My guess is that it took longer than two days...

[0] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation
This is 4 blocks from me. I went to check it out but there was a line of around 150 people out the door and I bailed since I wasn't willing to invest the 90 minutes in line.

There are already Yelp reviews: http://www.yelp.com/biz/dumb-starbucks-los-angeles
Pretty good guess
ShowHN: My weekend project, EyeToffee.com
I think you need to look a bit more closely at what's actually going into PID 1. See for example: http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/docs/systemd-dependenci...

I don't see any logind/hostnamed/journald or any of that stuff in PID1.
And the one major non-proven thing that it included - checked exceptions - is perhaps the most problematic feature.
Wasted Downloads – Your App’s First Revision
...so, Starbucks paid some guerrilla marketing company millions of dollars to stage an absurd publicity stunt.
Supporting Facts:

1. All publicity is good publicity.
2. All branding is identical, verbatim, (e.g. no
use of small, medium, large; instead branded sizing
parlance is used) forcing the customer to closely
inspect the imitation for flaws. This forces a level of
psychological engagement in the customer that would not
occur in regular, legitimate establishments.
3. Starbucks, for all it's popularity, rarely experiences
negative press. Thus, their brand can easily tolerate
examples of light trolling.
4. Dubious "news" coverage offers vectors for market
penetration into sectors that represent the Lowest
Common Denominator, without cheapening Starbucks'
brand. In other words, they can speak to an audience
that they'd rather not be associated with, without
having to directly engage them. They can inject their
brand's presence into the daily lives of people who
would not ordinarily pay attention to their usual modes
of advertising.
5. Without an entity to claim credit for this activity,
this parody only serves to provide increased exposure
to Starbucks. A well executed parody without an author
will provide no alternate context to the premise of the
joke. If there is any meaning or theme to the parody,
the audience can barely guess at what it should be, if
the intent of the performer cannot be discerned.

6. Hypothesis: The "Dumb" shop will only stay open for as
long as the minor local news publicity lasts. It's
there only to make people use the word "Starbucks" as
frequently as possible, in as many sound bites as
possible, trigger some water cooler conversation for
about a week (word of mouth buzz), and then die.
true random based on atmospheric noise: random.org
This is an extremely well articulated point. Nice job.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T1c7GkzRQQ

or a million MIDI sites on Geocities
scoutzie.com
> The issue here is that Dell sound cards output power (that can be approached by a factor of the quadratic of the amplitude) that Dell speakers cannot handle. Simply said, the sound card outputs at max 10W, and the speakers only can take 6W in, and neither their BIOS or drivers block this.

In other words, due to increase in amplitude, increasing volume over 100% can break the hardware? I am not trying to blame VLC, just that your statement "At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware" sounds a bit fallacious in the context of your own explanation.
Apparently these are called 'desire paths' or 'desire lines' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path).

I've heard this story as well. From this conversation (http://ask.metafilter.com/62599/Where-the-sidewalk-ends) it appears that people have heard that this technique was used on quite a few college campuses. (I wonder how many are actually true.)
To be honest like realy honest, i couldn't careless. The guy was making more money than me and given my current situation, i can't feel not even the most tiny drop of empathy for him. Don't even like the game.
I'm biased, since I taught myself C when I was a teenager. My first language was BASIC (first on the Apple II, then the Amiga.) When I got to high school, they were teaching Pascal on old 8086's. It felt like such a step backwards.

This was back in the early 90's. When I go to college, I was able to opt out of the first couple of intro CS classes (and get credit for them) by taking a test or two.
Right, by this logic literally anything might have a hidden cost that exceeds the demonstrable benefit. The onus is on the ones crying wolf to present concrete evidence. Otherwise, we will end up living in Soviet Union or Nazi Germany ( yes yes I know, Godwin's law)
It's a mistake to cast these things in absolutes. Hopefully I didn't do that.

Of course, all those things you mention are important. Critical, even. But appstores are not meritocracies, no more than the music industry is. You've got to be working at the top of your game, getting all the details right, and even then 1) you've got a small chance of making it big, and 2) somebody with less skill and execution might do much better than you do.

These aren't reasons to give up, just to understand the risks involved. This market exists to extract the maximum amount of developer work for the minimum amount of money. That way the consumers love their little gadgets more -- and will buy even more. It does not exist to make really great developers a decent living. (Although that's certainly possible)
You could probably do it in bad faith as long as you don't say it out loud. Maybe those guys are doing it in bad faith too. You'd never know.
What, die?
I disagree. I saw a ton of stuff I never should have seen at that age. It didn't scar me for life, but it's desensitized me to a lot of terrible things. Unless you're a doctor, I just don't think it's healthy to look at NSFL gore, go "meh", and move on to something else. I also occasionally have those images flash in my head. I don't want them there, but there's nothing I can do about that now.

(Granted, the same thing would have happened if I first saw them in my 20s, but at least I would have known what not to click.)
> If we have any lawyers that read our site, your comments below would be appreciated.

"These guys are working for free, why wouldn't you?"
> systemd makes it impossible to upgrade without rebooting. This leads to "Linux" becoming the laughing stock of Windows fans, as happened with Ubuntu a long time ago.

This irked me. It's just an unnecessary comparison. The ZDnet article linked is, and always was, completely fallacious in comparing an OS critical update channel to a fully-fledged distro package manager. Having just bought a brand new Windows laptop this weekend, I found myself spending no less than 2 hours tirelessly updating and rebooting Windows, and searching for, and installing, driver updates manually. It's 2014 and it still sucks. Windows update and OEM updaters are, in my experience, piss-poor and don't pick up half of the updates available to your average system.

Frankly I think your average Linux desktop could easily risk doubling or tripling the number and frequency of reboots demanded, and you'd still not reach a significant fraction of the annoyance of Windows on that particular front.
I'm curious how actually random are current generators in online poker? I mean, some rather subtle patterns, situations would generate larger pots, therefore more rake. Or being on the new players side in 50/50 situations would 'help' to get him addicted.

I am not talking about 100% of the time dealing someone pocket kings, and someone else pocket aces and king on the flop.

Something subtle and very rare would be enough to count for large amounts of money at the end of the year, given the volume of major poker sites. On other hand, if someone would leak it, that might ruin the business for good.
Absolutely, this cannot be repeated enough. And I say this as an unemployed member of the masses, not as a large shareholder with my fingers in a bunch of pies.

This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist.
Thanks, I will use Theta(N) next time. There are a bunch of complexity notations, omega, theta, o, etc. I need to brush up on them [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ol2JbwoJp0
I prefer for loops because they have easier to read and debug exception stack traces. And typing for(i=;...) is calming for me.
Meh. Conflating moby dick into the collapse of the roman empire, et al. It's an interecting vehicle to organize some conjecture under, but at it's core it's just pointing at large corporations as parasites, and doesn't offer any new insights.

He rambles on and on about political alignments, but he seriously neglects the honest roots of power that today's human civilizitions are couched in. Corporatized business activities are just the games that powerful civilians play in their spare time, lately. Power projection has nothing to do with the kangaroo courts of public opinion anymore. It just smoke and mirrors. A dog and pony show.

Monsanto's bad, m'kay? NSA's bad, m'kay? Fascism's bad, m'kay? Complex civilizations go through phases, m'kay? Read English literature m'kay?

Nice platitudes, but so what? Just another Sunday sermon, blah blah blah...
This is particularly amusing to me, as someone who regularly enjoys more... extreme genres of music that features lots of distortion and hard clipping. My no-name cheap Chinese speakers and headphones haven't died because of it, in fact my ears probably have less tolerance than the hardware.
Listen to the people around you...
and when it snows, it's big enough to sled downhill on
I think some of this speculation that this man is some cunning, super-intelligent villain gives him, an average human being, too much credit. Honestly, these "theories" are too outlandish to really be about the actions of a mere human being. What is honestly more believable, that he is some "super PR genius" or, perhaps, just had more than he could handle?
If you're determined to learn a foreign language its because you have social pressure to do so.

Or because you can envision a career path that will allow you to use it.

Or because you're a pedantic prick/prickess.

But mostly because its a college requirement.
Thanks, that's very interesting. Whether it's a fish brain or frog larva brain or something more, though, my point is that it's not yet intrinsically worth protecting as human life. Its worth is all potential. Consider: how much would would this life be worth if brain development stopped at this point? For a newborn or earlier, the answer is not much.
I assume "actively provisioned" doesn't just count Comcast's own network; the customer has to meet them halfway, and install an IPv6-compatible modem and router.

From that viewpoint, 25% seems quite impressive.
Given the article doesn't shed any light on who is behind this enterprise/stunt/whatever, I'm curious why they used the term "Successful Troll".

The use of either word in their own right is curious as I don't see what here constitutes this to be particularlly "successful" or how Dumb Starbuck's assertion of "fair use" motivation equates to "trolling"
Quiet And Distraction-Free. When I Forgot My Phone Charger.
Weird Al does not rely on fair use, he seeks permission from the rights holder[1].

I don't think their reading of fair use is correct here. They talk about the copyright doctrine, but the trademark doctrine is entirely separate.

Unlike the copyright doctrine, under the trademark doctrine, the commercial aspect of this works against them:
"In general, however, the courts appear to be more sympathetic to the extent that parodies are less commercial, and less sympathetic to the extent that parodies involve commercial use of the mark"[2]

(disclaimer: ianal)

[1] http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/cases/
[2] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm
Nice, thanks! Now _that_ I get.