skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That is obviously the answer because, hey, it worked for Apple, right?

The fact is, it really didn't work for Apple. Short of a few common design choices, iOS and OSX are very different, and for a good reason. I am not sure why it's not obvious to people. Mouse or keyboard driven UI can be much smaller and tighter, with a lot less chrome, to allow more room for data. Touch UI has to be chunkier by default. The simple truth is Metro UI works amazing on a touch device, I love it. Windows 7 works just fine on PC. What Microsoft really needed is 2 separate operating systems, just like apple. The Windows line could have been updated with a fresh skin, more stability improvements, and some core new features here and there. The Metro OS could have been a separate OS for the Phone, Tablet, and TV markets. Instead Microsoft now has 4 incompatible OS lines which all function very different, but look identical, only adding to the confusion:

1. Windows 8 - For PCs, Tablets, and God knows what else,

2. Windows RT - For Tablets which are not as nice as the Windows 8 tablets but can run some of the same software, but not all of it, and some apps which work on the RT actually do not run on Windows 8 tablets, and, so ..... yeah.

3. Windows Phone 8 - Exclusively for phones. For convenience, incompatible with Windows Phone 7 and 7.5.

4. XBox OS - Runs only on XBox, looks like Windows 8, but works very different.

So, instead of 2 visually distinct operating systems, Microsoft now has 4 visually similar operating systems. I can see their logic, they wanted to leverage their huge PC instal base to drag some users to their Tablet and Phone products. Much like Apple is using iPods to sell people on iPhones and iPads, and perhaps later, Macs. But the problem is, they are not really achieving that goal, while pissing of their core PC customers.
In a sense, they did keep polishing. It's just that they had another, much larger team adding shiny features that became roadblocks to existing users.

I used to run Win7 in a form that looked very much like XP. The newer OS had many small improvements and refinements, not just the 'in-your-face' big ticket items. Windows 8 actually sounds the same - Microsoft published some interesting articles during development about lots of kernel-level changes, systems tweaks and so on (e.g. look at the windows process manager)

The problem has always been the massive forced-down-your-throat changes that MS insist upon, and Windows 8 took that even further.
Sometimes ads aren't really to convince people to use a thing, but sort of just to reinforce an existing "brand relationship".

See: Almost all of Coca-Cola's advertising, for example.
The SpriteKit physics engine uses Box2D internally. Here is a dump of the SpriteKit framework:

https://ghostbin.com/paste/tm4ko

b2* shows up in there many times.

edit: slow pony
It's even in this article. The first sentence is largely at odds with the tone of the rest of the article: "I defended windows 8 from the outset" then "it's been a massive cockup from the outset". There seems to be little self-reflection that all the other commentators were right, and Thurrot was wrong.

The advice in the final paragraphs is just plain wrong as well. It should be "Don't use one OS GUI for two different user paradigms", not "abandon an entire market segment". Windows needs to go back to a traditional desktop, and Windows Mobile should continue on as is.
I actually like Windows 8 more than any other version. I'll never use it full time (Linux user, right now SUSE with Gnome Shell) for reasons that have nothing to do with its design, but I really like the Metro interface.

Most of the naysayers are simply unwilling to accept change, the same naysayers that whine about modern Linux DEs.
Developers live in Terminal and text editors, and regular people don't care about customization? There's a reason why Linux on the desktop didn't pan out. People don't want choice. They want to be told what to do and get on with their life.
I think programmer tried to be defensive by ignoring an edge case. He either was lazy in searching for its documentation (<= 1999 you know) and tried to be over-smart to avoid "Out of Range" exception in test/production. Or he didn't consider looking at documentation like some of us do.
He may have given it a shot by running it several times to see if it actually generates the number provided as an argument.
It's not just Windows. Microsoft has a virus design team. Look what they did to visual studio. The new visual studio flat design (from 2012) is really awful. All caps in menu. No color in icons. Everybody hates those changes.

Don't know what they are thinking!
> Looks great! What are the benefits of using this over something like Unity?

For my industry (gambling) Unity costs $200K/title. Price gouging IMO but it's their business to charge what they like.
Small list:

* Learn to take orders

* Listen, (so many people dont listen)

* Ask Questions

* Learn as much as you can

* Dont turn up late

* Dont be the first one to leave at the end of the day, wait for one person to go before you pack up.

* Follow requirements

* If you find problems pop your project manager an email (and keep a copy).

* Dont drop production database
Interesting and apt use of Steve Jobs's truck vs. car analogy at the end:

"Maybe Windows needs to be more like GMC, the part of GM that only makes trucks (and truck-based SUVs). After all, while many people choose to use a truck for basic transportation, they're really designed and optimized for work. You know, as should be Windows."
I'm glad MS is building OSes.

Imagine if they built cars; the brake pedal would be next to the brake lights.
I can count twenty (now) too, and I still won't touch it. By the time I was a teenager with that C++ book, I'd already been programming, whenever I could find hardware, and reading about programming for five or so years. I was kinda obsessed.
That's one of the biggest reasons I left. The majority of people I met seemed career driven, not product quality driven, and were happy to march to orders set a year ago -- however misguided now -- if it meant a checkbox filled on their review.
Really nice...this requires lot of work..keep it up.
Well they already killed their XNA framework...
He is a journalist, he wasn't found when he downloaded the files, but when he wrote about their content.

Leasing a server wouldn't have changed a thing in that specific case.

Anyway, bluetouff is well-versed in computer security and the co-founder of a VPN service, so I suspect the files weren't downloaded from a french IP adress.
Hardly. PC gaming was big before the Xbox and one could argue that the platform would be actually better off without it: a lot of PC games are shitty console ports or just crippled in general because the low-end hardware of these consoles.

And the "next-generation" doesn't look better either. Console hardware is already outdated right out of the gate, the second half of their generation will be painful.
> anti-systemd folks

[note: no personal hostility intended - I'm responding to the idea of "anti-systemd" in the abstract]

It's this kind of us-vs-the, faction-oriented attitude that concerns some of us. Nobody[1] is saying systemd should be expunged from the repositories or removed as an option.

The concern is that a newcomer (i.e. potentially buggy, but could prove itself over time) to the area of "init software" is demanding to be the only software allowed for that particular problem. Even more concerning is how that same newcomer as monopolistic tendencies, and has started tying/bundling together several neighboring software niches, demanding that the currently used and working solutions in those areas be abandoned as well, because of some made up requirement.

If you or anybody else wants to run systemd, you should. In reading these discussion on it, it even sounds like a great choice for some situations (the people setting up "tens of thousands" of mostly-identical systems seem to like it a lot). Some distros make it the default? Why not, variety is one of the great things about having multiple distros to choose from.

Insistence that OpenRC and such must make way for systemd is enough provoke a rather strong reaction. The deliberate incompatibilities to force adoption, on the other hand, are borderline fighting words.

This pattern - trying to suppress competing ideas while claiming the opposition is being unreasonable for suggesting some sort of compromise - is something I've had to fight in politics for a long time. It's expected any time atheism or gay marriage is brought up.

I never thought I would see that kind of "argument" used seriously[2] over UNIX...

1: "nobody", modulo the rare fanatic/ass that you find in any sufficiently large group of people. Even the linked article above - despite the presence of strong opinions - is more concerned with technical issues and how to solve the "init system problem" in general.

2: we have had our Holy Wars, but traditionally only leads to strange stuff like "evil-mode"
Switched from my Android to WP

If only there were a third mobile OS for you to try, one that's actually well-designed, one that even many Google employees use ...
7 was little different from Vista, to the point that some people were calling it Vista Service Pack 2. And the basic workflow between XP and Vista was pretty similar - they're both traditional desktops (though somehow vista takes 20GB to do what XP does in 600MB).

Maybe they should stop trying to do a "revolutionary redesign" every new release and just stick with one approach for a couple of years?

It's every second major release, not every release - 3.1 was alright; 95 big redesign, sucked; 98 serviceable; 2000 wasn't ready for primetime, but the redesign was adopting NT into the desktop OS; XP built on that to became the world's default OS; vista sucked; win7 was solid; win8 sucks; win9... ?
It's more like what I usually describe as "car crash architecture" - ramming together two things that really don't belong together in the hope that they still work and nobody notices the rather obvious gaping seams.
I thought that it was pretty well established that Windows is in an alternating cycle of good and bad versions. Everyone freaks out during the bad part of that cycle, as Microsoft takes a bunch of bold risks, many of which don't really work out, and then a few years later they prune many of the bad decisions and release something reasonably solid.

(Man, it feels weird leaving this comment as a Linux user and reformed Mac zealot)
although needing 16GB of space, something that's still the default for "high-end mobile devices" today, just for Windows alone, still sucks

Not to mention virtual machines. Backing up and transferring around virtual machine images of vista and beyond really sucks hard. I know one ops guy who is keeping his XP install simply because it's base install size is about 3% the size of Vista an onward; much better for VMs.
Yes, it was indeed a joke. And one which has apparentlly fallen flat.
Even Jobs himself used the car/truck analogy to compare OS X to iOS. I think he's right. These are separate products. One is for work, the other one is more general purpose. There will always be more cars than trucks, but there will always be a need for trucks. You're not going to be hauling manure or towing a boat in a car.

The question for MS is will they be OK with selling trucks in a car world? Will they be satisfied with how much money they would make selling only trucks to farmers and construction companies?

I say MS needs to make cars and trucks. They need to make the best trucks out there without compromises. The best cars without compromises. Not this weird car/truck hybrid.
Hence the Gnome desktop's new direction. I actually quite like it (on good hardware with fully functional graphics drivers) but I know that some find the reduction in configuration and removal of options hard.
Probably not.

This is about the myopic quarter to quarter focus on profits by the market, the stock market in the last 30 years has been increasingly unable to to focus on the long game - if it does generate income or profit by the next quarter, its rubbish.

This attitude has wormed its way all through the economy, its part of why its hard to get a company to promote from within - they expect their employees to come from the outside with all the tool/skills/knowledge to hit the road running - even if they are at a significant disadvantage in actually understanding a companies operations. It used to be you could get an entry level job and company X, and expect a regular set of promotions up the chain, now, to get that promotion, you need to go work some place else almost.
As some of the Rust developers hang around here, a question:

Result is the Either monad in Scala / Haskell? So IO functions return either a success wrapping a value, or a failure? This is great -- I'm a big fan of this style of error handling. However it seems that Rust doesn't have syntax for monads -- the equivalent of Haskell's do and Scala's for. This makes monads a bit of a PITA. Is there a plan to address this?
Here's the first crossroad, where we diverge:

> Now define a maximum amplitude V > 0.

The problem being discussed is one in which the user cranks up the volume such that the maximum volume level is far exceeded, and the amplifier circuit, which cannot reproduce the higher level, instead clips the waveform at the supply voltage.

> The claim you made that sparked this conversation was this: "the resulting clipped waveform carries a lot more energy than an unclipped one."

And it does, as you can see from this diagram:

http://i.imgur.com/oE5NFZ9.png

The red trace is the 100% volume level for the system, and it is not clipped. The green, "clipped" trace is far above 100%. It's really very simple.

> But this claim seems to contradict my Claim 2.

Yes. Your claim 2 doesn't apply to a case in which the maximum output voltage of the amplifier cannot reproduce the input waveform. So instead the amplifier clips its input signal at its voltage limits, as the above diagram shows.

The interesting thing about this analysis is that two ways to analyze it produce the same result.

If we use a simple integration of the unclipped and clipped cases, we see a power increase of 2.46, as discussed earlier.

If instead we use Fourier analysis to examine the harmonics of a sine wave and a square wave, the square wave's higher harmonic energies sum to 2.46 of the original sine wave's energy level in the speaker (but pi/2 above the sinewave voltage levels):

Sine wave harmonic lines = 1f

Square wave harmonic lines = (4/pi) sum(sin(2 pi f t (2k-1) / (2k-1),k,1,oo) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_wave#Examining_the_squar...)

The outcomes obviously have to come out the same. The above shows how they do it.
Child Discovers Rain for the first time.
The runtime type erasure would have to be quite clever to realize that a ArrayList<Integer> should be backed by a primitive array of ints? One alternative is to erase ArrayList<T> into all variants (One for objects and one for each primitive type).

(In C# System.Int32 is a value type, and an "int" is equivalent). A List<Int32> is equivalent to a List<int> and is backed by an array of ints.)
That's funny, I switched from WP8 to Symbian a few weeks ago. An OS that doesn't have an accessible file system isn't very useful to me. Might as well use an S40 phone.
It this means they stop ruining Windows, I'm all for it.
"I'm not entirely convinced the off-by-1 is substantial".

What? You don't think always putting ace of spades at the bottom of the deck is substantial? (given that's what "52" represents)
Hah, nice one. For people not getting the joke, adding two random numbers reduces the randomness and concentrates the results around a mean.

Interestingly, the perception that adding random numbers together results in even more random numbers is behind the popularity of the scam game "razzle". In razzle there's usually a board containing an array of depressions each lined up with a different value onto which is dropped a number of marbles (there are other ways to play as well, including dice). The important part is the scoring board. After each toss the values where all the marbles landed are added up and then a board is consulted to see how many "points" are scored from that value. The game is easy, get to 10 points and you win. However, there are two tricks. First, the scoring board is arranged in non sequential order. This is to conceal the fact that the group of middle numbers do not win any points. In actuality it is very difficult to win any points, since the probabilities are all concentrated in the middle. Second, because of the scattered nature of the scoring board it's very easy for the person running the game to cheat in your favor by "accidentally" giving you points when you shouldn't have earned them. The scam then works fairly simply. People pay money for each throw, and they are given the opportunity to win a high value prize. For the early throws the operator goes quickly and fudges the score lookups, building up points for the player that they haven't actually used, and giving them an unwarranted confidence in the game. After the player gets within a point or so of winning the operator then lets stops cheating and lets them play completely fairly on their own, at which point they have odds of worse than a thousand to one of winning (keeping in mind that it costs money for every throw).
It's not the only one. Concurrency support ('synchronized') may be another one and I would see that one even more problematic.

Just recently I was hit by a runtime exception from a library which apparently decided that using undocumented unchecked exceptions was a good idea. The vast majority of open source libraries are not or poor documented, even ones which are used heavily (as in my case). In these, checked exceptions are a godsend as they MUST appear in the method signature.

For many programmers, exceptions just get in their way and they handle them poorly which is imho one reason for the bad reputation of checked exceptions.
Another example is:

_.forEach(array, function(item) {
doSomething();
if (condition) {
// exits iteration early
return false;
}
});

This is just not possible with native `Array#forEach` – you’d have to use a plain `for` loop with a conditional `break` statement instead, or rewrite your code to use `Array#some`.
It is a shame that Minecraft modding is so horrific because, as you say, it would be a very powerful motivator to get young people involved in programming.

Even the RPi Minecraft appears to lack information about modding:

http://pi.minecraft.net/
Posting this with a throwaway as I don't want it to be associated with my named account.

Thurrott is full of shit. I call for him to step down and shut down winsupersite and to generally shut up. He's not a windows user -- merely a critic. This is about spinning hits than a valid critique of windows. All he is doing is damaging the company and the industry by recycling this shit over and over again.

There are those of us who use windows both for our own personal use and business use. It suits us well simply because there is nothing else with the broad scope that Microsoft offer. Windows 8, whilst not a great success, is exactly what people asked for. The tech news sites spewed how the future was tablets and closed ecosystems powered by app models ao they dived into the consumer market with exactly what people expected. Unfortunately they discovered that the consumer market (which didn't really exist) is just a bunch of fashionista journos' wet dreams and fanboys.

Now I'm a Unix guy who saw exactly the same thing happen in the 1990s when Microsoft kicked in the Unix vendors. However they did it through actually providing products people wanted and providing long support lifecycles rater than disposable trinkets and rapid change.

Give them a break and look at your 2 year life throwaway trinket phone and tell me that's what you want for the future? That's what you asked for, that's what you got.
It's Monday morning in Europe.
OS X. Now free
Totally agree. Between XP and W7 they moved a ton of settings around for absolutely no reason what so ever. Now they have done it all over again. There is no reason why "Add Remove Programs" should have been renamed to "Programs and Features." I am not saying that one name is batter then the other, just saying they should pick one damn name and stick with it, and polish the rest of the OS.
One word: Idiots.

Seriously, those investors are morons. MS has never been a a company that fits the adjective: "lean". MS is practically a post-secondary institution unto itself! MS' far-reaching speculative research is the stuff of legend, and far too infrequently translated into the commercial sphere. Anyone who thinks they should narrow their focus and ignore more of the fruits of their labor instead of less is an idiot.
> They want to be told what to do.

Why degrade people like that? You sound like those hard-core Android fanbois that never misses a chance to tell you they think iPhone users are sheep. :-(

No, they want the software and options to be thought through before released.

Why have 20 options for 100% of the users, when 16 good defaults and 4 options is the better way for 90+% of the users? In OS X, I bet most of those 16 options can be changed using a terminal command.
In a real city, you can usually walk or at the very least, cycle to your grocery store.

Gotta love that goalpost shifting. Have you considered that there are plenty of cities here in the US (real or not, by your standards) where that's not true?

We are talking about cities like Philly, and people that live in cities like Philly, we are not talking about some exurb that uses subsidized parking in major cities to facilitate their commute.

The problem is that without the commuters coming in, the urban core dies. This is exactly what happened in Detroit. Now, it's possible that if you already have an excellent transit system and a vibrant urban core (like New York, for example), you can impose congestion charges and get away with it, because the core of the city is attractive enough for people to continue to want to go there and the public transit system is robust enough to carry them. But that's not the case in Philadelphia. For older "rust belt" cities, which are already having issues with people moving away to sunnier, warmer southern cities with lower taxes and bigger roads, making the core of the city even more inaccessible isn't a winning strategy.
“turns out I’m really good at killing people.”

The president added, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

Ironic words for a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
My experience has not been the same. Making Windows do reasonable stuff, like not lose focus for dumb reasons, close windows instead of minimizing them when you hit the close button, have virtual desktops at all, have a good fuzzy-search app launcher, and so on, has been a pretty rough experience. Lots of these problems have solutions that technically exist but are so cumbersome to use I'd rather not bother. A real solution called LiteStep allows you to create an environment that is reasonable to use if you put in a lot of effort up front and are okay with your shell crashing every couple days.

Beyond the UI stuff, some MS software is just not meant to be uninstalled. I wanted to test an app without the VC++ 2008 redistributable installed, to see which dlls a user would need. Easy, right? Just go to control panel -> add or remove programs -> click on VC++ 2008 redistributable, and it's gone... except that all of the dlls are still there, in a huge folder with hundreds of other dlls. Which ones are for the VC++ 2008 redistributable? I have no idea. On some platforms I could just rm -rf VC++2008.framework, but not here. I guess MS thinks it would be better for usability if people had to reinstall the OS and wait through hours of updates just to remove some shared libraries.
Slashdot alternative in the works
It is possible to create one game and then sell it 10x times with different name/images.